April 9, 2025 Story by: Publisher
President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to allow him to fire two Biden appointees on U.S. labor boards, despite federal laws that protect members of those panels from being dismissed without cause.
Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to temporarily remove two board members at independent labor agencies while the justices consider whether the president may permanently fire them.
The brief order does not necessarily indicate which way the court is leaning in the case. Instead, the procedural move will give the justices a few days to consider written arguments before deciding whether or not to grant Trump’s request.
If the justices side with Trump, they could pave the way for him to summarily fire dozens of other regulators who run so-called independent agencies — and install loyalists in their place.
In an emergency appeal filed Wednesday, the Justice Department asked the high court to lift lower-court orders blocking Trump from firing National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris.
The NLRB enforces federal labor laws that protect the right to unionize in the private sector. The MSPB adjudicates complaints from federal government employees who say they were unfairly fired or demoted. Both Wilcox and Harris had been serving as the chairs of their respective boards before Trump attempted to fire them.
Congress has passed laws barring presidents from removing the board members who run most independent agencies unless they commit certain types of misconduct. But the Trump administration argues that those limitations are unconstitutional because they infringe on his authority to control the entirety of the executive branch.
“The President should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the Administration’s policy objectives for a single day,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the new appeal.
Beyond Wilcox and Harris, Trump has moved to fire various other leaders of federal agencies, including the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission and the Democratic chair of the Federal Election Commission. Those efforts are also being challenged in court.
Conflicting lower-court rulings have caused Wilcox and Harris to be reinstated, dismissed and reinstated again in the past several weeks. In the most recent order Monday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals voted, 7-4, to return Wilcox and Harris to their posts.
Sauer urged the Supreme Court to immediately remove the two officials again. And he asked the court to schedule an unusual special argument session in May — after arguments are scheduled to have concluded for the current term — so the justices could fully consider Trump’s constitutional prerogative to fire agency officials at will. The solicitor general said the uncertainty about the president’s power was untenable at numerous powerful commissions and boards across the government.
“If the Court instead defers a decision until next Term,” Sauer wrote, those panels “might all remain under a legal cloud until 2026, and the President might be forced to continue entrusting executive power to fired officers for more than a quarter of his four-year term.”
Shortly after Sauer filed the appeal, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary, administrative order pausing the lower-court rulings that had reinstated Wilcox and Harris. Roberts’ order effectively ousted the two officials from their posts yet again while the high court decides what to do next.
Wilcox and Harris argue that a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent confirms the constitutionality of laws limiting the president’s authority to dismiss members of multi-member boards to cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” However, in recent years, the court has cut back the sweep of that precedent.
In February, the high court rebuffed a Trump administration request to immediately dismiss another Biden-appointed official whom lower courts had reinstated in the wake of his firing by Trump: Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. Last month, an appeals court sided with Trump and the federal workforce watchdog dropped his legal challenge.
