The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that President Trump cannot, for now, remove a government lawyer who leads a watchdog agency while the lawyer’s challenge to his firing moves forward. But the court’s brief, unsigned order indicated that it may soon return to the issue, noting that a trial judge’s temporary restraining order is set to expire next week.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan noted that they would have rejected the Trump administration’s request for Supreme Court intervention outright. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., filed a dissent.
The majority, Justice Gorsuch wrote, presumably acted as it did because temporary restraining orders like the one in place in the case generally cannot be appealed — that is, he said, it “may not yet have ripened into an appealable order.”
“Respectfully,” he added, “I believe that it has and that each additional day where the order stands only serves to confirm the point.”
This is the first case arising from Mr. Trump’s broad use of executive power in his second term to reach the Supreme Court, and it comes as the president is seeking to remove thousands of federal employees, including some in roles long thought protected from summary dismissal.
The lawyer, Hampton Dellinger, has served as head of the Office of Special Counsel, which was created by Congress in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers. It is unrelated to the special counsels appointed by the Justice Department.
The law says the special counsel must be confirmed by the Senate, serves for a five-year term and “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Mr. Dellinger, who was confirmed last year, was fired by an administration official in a terse email on Feb. 7. It did not say why.
He sued, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington entered a temporary restraining order allowing Mr. Dellinger to keep his job for two weeks while she considered whether to enter a preliminary injunction.
After a divided three-judge panel of a federal appeals court said it lacked jurisdiction to consider the matter, that administration turned to the Supreme Court.
“This case involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief,” Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote, adding: “These judicial rulings irreparably harm the presidency by curtailing the president’s ability to manage the executive branch in the earliest days of his administration.”
In response, Joshua A. Matz, a lawyer for Mr. Dellinger, agreed that the case presented “weighty and complex questions of constitutional law.” But Mr. Matz said Supreme Court review was premature.
The justices, he wrote, should not rule on such fundamental questions in the context of a fast-moving emergency application arising from a temporary restraining order. “At bottom,” Mr. Matz wrote, “there is no merit to the government’s effort to declare a five-alarm fire based on a short-lived T.R.O. that preserves the status quo ante as prescribed by a half-century-old statute.”
He added that ruling prematurely, before full consideration of the case, could “provoke destabilizing, harmful consequences.”
Ms. Harris wrote that the legal issues were straightforward and asked the court to address them immediately. The court’s decision in July in Trump v. United States, granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity from prosecution, made clear that the administration must prevail, she said.
Ms. Harris also cited two recent decisions, involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that had concluded that presidents may fire the heads of agencies led by a single official at will.
After the court ruled in the second case in 2021, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fired the head of the housing agency. Not long after, citing the earlier decisions, he fired the head of the Social Security Administration.
Under those precedents and practices, Ms. Harris wrote, the case involving Mr. Dellinger was an easy one.
Mr. Matz acknowledged that the court had allowed for such firings in the past, at least where the agencies in question had broad authority.
But he said the Office of Special Counsel has far more limited responsibilities. Indeed, he wrote, the Supreme Court distinguished it from the C.F.P.B. in the decision allowing the removal of its leader.
Presidents of both parties have expressed reservations about whether Congress is entitled to place limits on the president’s power to remove to the head of the Office of Special Counsel. But the Supreme Court has suggested that the agency may have distinctive features that justify differing treatment.
Mr. Dellinger’s office, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2020 in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “exercises only limited jurisdiction to enforce certain rules governing federal government employers and employees” and “does not bind private parties at all or wield regulatory authority comparable to the C.F.P.B.”
Ms. Harris argued the court should go ahead and intervene, citing the case as an example of a “broader, weekslong trend” by lower court judges to impinge on Trump’s constitutional powers by issuing temporary restraining orders that have halted various polices. Among them, she wrote, were orders denying access to Treasury Department data and prohibiting the administration from suspending foreign aid money.
Mr. Matz countered that “this would be an especially unfortunate moment at which to weaken” the Office of Special Counsel, “given the historic upheaval currently occurring within federal employment and the continued importance of ensuring that whistle-blowers are guarded from reprisal.”
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