Supreme Court Allows Trump to Fire Independent Regulators

The Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to fire two members of federal labor review boards appointed by former President Joe Biden, whom he said were at odds with his agenda.

In a 6-3 decision, the court said that Trump could terminate Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board after lower courts blocked the firings. The court granted the request from the Trump administration as litigation plays out.

The court wrote that “because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President … [Trump] may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions.”

“The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power. But we do not ultimately decide in this posture whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within such a recognized exception; that question is better left for resolution after full briefing and argument,” the court wrote.

“The stay also reflects our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty,” the conservative wing of the court wrote in their decision.

The ruling added that the court did not believe that it would pave the way for Trump to remove members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or members of the Federal Open Market Committee.

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented from the majority decision.

“Not since the 1950s (or even before) has a President, without a legitimate reason, tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency—a multi-member, bipartisan commission exercising regulatory power whose governing statute contains a for-cause provision,” Kagan wrote in her dissent.

In court filings, Solicitor General John Sauer said that presidents were not mandated to keep federal bureaucrats in power if they did not align with his agenda.

“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 — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” Sauer wrote.

Since his inauguration in January, Trump has pushed to fire broad swaths of federal workers across all levels of the federal government.