Two former members of an independent civil liberties watchdog agency who were fired by President Trump sued the government on Monday, asking a court to declare their terminations illegal and reinstate them to their former positions.
The lawsuit is the latest in a deluge of litigation arising from Mr. Trump’s firings of officials as part of an assault on the basic structure of the federal government.
The former officials, Travis LeBlanc and Edward W. Felten, were among three Democratic-selected members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board whom Mr. Trump ousted on Jan. 27. He also dismissed a third member, Sharon Bradford Franklin, but she was due to depart two days later anyway and did not join the lawsuit.
A fourth seat was already vacant, so the departures left the five-member board with only one member, Beth Williams, who had been chosen by Republicans. The removals paralyzed the agency by leaving it without enough members to take official actions like starting an investigative project or issuing a board report with a policy recommendation.
In the opening weeks of his second term, Mr. Trump has been on a firing spree — violating statutes in which Congress set limits on when a president may remove certain types of officials. Many of those summary firings have led to lawsuits, apparently setting up test cases to see whether the Supreme Court will expand presidential power by striking the laws down as infringing on Mr. Trump’s constitutional powers.
Many of those cases, however, center on explicit limits Congress wrote into law that say presidents cannot fire particular types of officials at will, but only for a cause like misconduct. Such lawsuits include Mr. Trump’s firings of members of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board.
The challenge on Monday will be more complicated because Congress did not explicitly write into a statute that board members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board could be removed only for cause, even though the law creating the board declares that it is an “independent” agency.
But there has been a general understanding that all officials atop independent agencies are shielded by implicit protections that allow for removal only for cause. For example, the law for another independent agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, also lacks such a clause, but in a 2010 case, the Supreme Court assumed, without actually deciding, that it nevertheless implicitly exists as a limit.
Congress originally set up the privacy board for its members to serve at the president’s “pleasure,” but later revised the statute to remove that provision and make the board an “independent agency.” The complaint argued that this change and other factors meant the court should interpret the law as barring arbitrary firings.
“Reading the statute to permit removal without cause would both contravene the statute’s literal meaning and fundamentally undermine the scheme of agency independence that Congress deliberately designed,” the complaint said.
Congress established the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as an independent agency after the Sept. 11 attacks. Its job is to investigate national security activities that can intrude upon individual rights, like surveillance affecting Americans or the use of terrorism watch lists to subject people to extra screening in airport security lines.
It has security clearances and subpoena power, and is set up to have five members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, who serve six-year terms and can stay on for another after that if no successor has been confirmed. Some members are picked by the president, and some are selected by congressional leaders of the other party.
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