A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from firing Cathy Harris, the chair of an independent board that protects government workers from political discrimination and unfair labor practices, including wrongful termination.
The order was the second time a judge had sided with a government watchdog who sued to prevent their own removal. Lawsuits challenging President Trump’s ability to reshape entire agencies and traditionally independent panels have advanced all the way to the Supreme Court, providing an early test of courts’ willingness to check the president’s ambitions.
Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said that Ms. Harris should retain her position, citing a raft of Supreme Court cases as precedent.
The board’s “mission and purpose require independence,” he wrote, adding that such independence “would evaporate if the president could terminate its members without cause, even if a court could later order them reinstated.”
The ruling was handed down as the Supreme Court was deliberating in a similar case involving Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency tasked with investigating whistle-blower complaints and allegations of wrongdoing in the federal government. Mr. Dellinger was fired by the Trump administration on Feb. 7, but courts have so far stepped in to keep him in that post.
Ms. Harris, a government lawyer on the Merit Systems Protection Board, was fired by Mr. Trump earlier this year. She sued, arguing that her removal was politically motivated. The law creating the board envisioned it as a nonpartisan body, with three members serving staggered seven-year terms, in order to give different administrations the opportunity to shape its makeup.
Ms. Harris was nominated to the board by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and confirmed to the post by the Senate in 2022. According to the law establishing Ms. Harris’s office, a president can remove someone from that post only because of “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance.”
The Merit Systems Protection Board is at the center of fired federal employees’ efforts to push back against the large-scale personnel changes directed by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a top adviser. Last week, the board sided with six probationary federal workers, all from different agencies, who argued their firings were prohibited. Mr. Dellinger is the lawyer investigating the personnel actions.
At a hearing on Monday about the motion by Ms. Harris’s lawyers to block her firing, lawyers sparred over the limits of the president’s authority.
Jeremy S.B. Newman, a Justice Department lawyer, told Judge Contreras on Monday that the president’s authority under the Constitution should include the power to hire and fire officials like Mr. Dellinger and Ms. Harris the same way the president appoints the heads of other executive agencies.
Nathaniel Zelinsky, a lawyer representing Ms. Harris, repeatedly called the government’s conclusions “dead wrong,” insisting that if Judge Contreras accepted them, the Trump administration could effectively fire nearly anyone in positions of authority, including at independent agencies.
“The theory you’re hearing is breathtaking,” Mr. Zelinsky said, adding that “anyone who exercises an ounce of executive authority” would be removable, according to the government’s reasoning.
Judge Contreras agreed, writing in the opinion on Tuesday that the board “spends nearly all of its time adjudicating ‘inward-facing personnel matters’ involving federal employees” and was intended by Congress to be insulated from politics in that pursuit. He added that the board’s powers are relatively narrow and the decisions and inquiries it can open have “limited effects on the president’s powers.”
The two sides also clashed over whether the demands made by Ms. Harris’s lawyers amounted to restraining the president from making his desired staffing choices, by barring his subordinates in charge of personnel offices from firing individuals like Ms. Harris. Mr. Newman said on Monday that the lawsuit would “have that effect” by preventing Mr. Trump from “effectuating removal” of certain officials in the executive branch.
Mr. Zelinsky said the notion that a court could not intervene to stop the Office of Personnel Management or the White House Presidential Personnel Office from carrying out firings threatened to undermine the power that courts have exercised since the foundational 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison.
“If that were true, judicial review would be over,” he said.
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