In the tiny corner of the legal world that follows such things, the March ruling crashed down like a thunderbolt.
It was issued by an obscure government agency called the Merit Systems Protection Board, whose purpose is to protect federal workers from unfair firings. But the decision backed President Trump’s assertion that he has broad authority to reshape the executive branch as he wants.
The ruling broke with decades of precedent, accepting the White House’s argument that Article II of the Constitution gives Mr. Trump the power to dismiss officials without due process. By that theory, he can essentially erase civil service protections, even for public servants — in this case, immigration judges — whose engagement with the law often puts them at odds with Mr. Trump’s political aims.
The board’s decision has no direct bearing on cases that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this week, which could establish how far the president’s power over the civil service extends. But it defanged the most effective method for federal workers to challenge their dismissals, and if upheld on appeal could undercut protections for broad swaths of the civil service.
And it came after the Trump administration leveled a concerted pressure campaign on the board in public and private, according to people with knowledge of the process. The private push — little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule — was led by a White House aide who for years has been intently focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers.
The story of how the ruling came about illustrates the intense effort by the Trump White House to advance its theory of the unitary executive, the belief among many conservatives that the president has sweeping authority over the entire executive branch, and can direct the actions of employees, including federal prosecutors and immigration judges, who handle sensitive matters of law.
“Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law,” said Nicholas Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota who studies the federal civil service. The decision, he said, “reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service.”
Asked for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Allison Schuster, said: “There can constitutionally be no independent executive branch agencies because independence from the president would mean independence from the voters who elected him.”
A spokesman for the board declined to comment.
An Unsettling Meeting
Four days after an unusual White House meeting in late November, Henry Kerner, the board’s acting chair, assembled a small group of his staff. He seemed shaken and unsure how to proceed.
Mr. Kerner was one of the board’s remaining leaders. The agency’s name is a mouthful, but its function is crucial: It acts as an independent arbiter between government agencies and dismissed workers. After Mr. Trump’s mass firings in 2025, the board was inundated with claims from scores of workers who turned to it as their last resort.
If the administration could sway the board to rule its way, it would drastically enhance the White House’s power — and violate the board’s independence.
Which was why Mr. Kerner seemed unsettled. According to the people with knowledge of the matter, he recounted to his colleagues the nature of the White House meeting with Trump administration officials, including a special assistant to the president, James Sherk.
According to the people, the White House meeting took place at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Nov. 21. Along with Mr. Sherk and Mr. Kerner, Keith Sonderling, then the deputy secretary of the Labor Department and Stefanie Wehagen, an associate counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office, were in attendance.
A White House official with knowledge of the matter said that the primary purpose of the meeting was to interview Mr. Kerner, as he was being considered for nomination as the board’s permanent chair.
The administration officials seemed to understand the sensitivity of even discussing the board’s work. They made a point of saying that Mr. Kerner was not being told how to rule, which the White House official said showed that the idea of a push against the board was “categorically false.”
But the officials conveyed to Mr. Kerner that they believed the board was bound to follow the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion on Article II cases, one of which would involve two immigration judges, Megan Jackler and Brandon Jaroch.
A Wonk Seeks Broader Firings
The White House did not worry much about the board during Mr. Trump’s first term. The agency was hamstrung, lacking the quorum of two members it needs to make final decisions.
Still, Mr. Sherk, who is 45 and originally from Canada, had the board in his sights. (The White House declined to make Mr. Sherk available for an interview.)
For years, Mr. Sherk worked at the Heritage Foundation, churning out policy papers about waste and abuse within the civil service. In 2014, he delivered remarks about the issue to lawmakers.
“Federal law makes it very difficult to separate federal employees from their jobs,” he said. He identified the board as a key obstacle, even though it has sided with federal agencies in the vast majority of cases.
Mr. Sherk joined Mr. Trump’s first-term domestic policy office, devoting entire meetings to the board. But he did not act against it then. He was focused on stripping a broad category of federal employees of their civil service protections, an initiative known as Schedule F that was put into place just before the 2020 election.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. reversed that initiative. He also restored a quorum to the M.S.P.B., which churned through the backlog of cases that had piled up during Mr. Trump’s term. Among the board’s new members were Mr. Kerner and Cathy Harris.
Mr. Sherk joined the America First Policy Institute, a bastion of MAGA ideology. In a 2022 report called “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump,” he again cited the M.S.P.B. as a crucial roadblock. Mr. Sherk acknowledged in the report that it would be up to Congress to change the law governing civil service protections.
Then Mr. Trump returned to power.
A Decision in Line With Trump
During the first Trump administration, Mr. Kerner, a Republican, had led the Office of Special Counsel. There, it fell to him to inform Mr. Trump that Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president, had violated the Hatch Act. Some believed him to be a natural target in Mr. Trump’s second term.
But in 2025, when Mr. Trump first moved against the board, he singled out its Democratic chair, Ms. Harris, rather than Mr. Kerner, purporting to fire her.
Ms. Harris sued the Trump administration, saying that it could not fire her without cause. The Supreme Court blocked her reinstatement last year as litigation continued.
Her dismissal, and the Supreme Court’s temporary acceptance of it, left Mr. Kerner in a bind. Nothing appeared to be stopping Mr. Trump from firing him or a newly anointed board member, James J. Woodruff II.
Unprecedented firings were taking place across the government. In some, like the ousters of Ms. Jackler and Mr. Jaroch, the immigration judges, and Maurene Comey, a Manhattan federal prosecutor and the daughter of the former F.B.I. director, the Trump administration cited the president’s Article II power, offering no further explanation.
Last September, Ms. Comey sued to contest her firing. She argued that her case should be heard by a federal court, in part because the Merit Systems Protection Board “cannot and does not” function as intended. In her particular case, she said, the board would be especially handicapped given its longstanding reluctance to weigh in on the president’s Article II authority.
In the past, the board declined to intervene in part because doing so might call into question the legality of its existence. If the president’s power were supreme enough to fire any federal worker despite the protections offered by the Civil Service Reform Act, then the board, a product of that same statute, might itself be unconstitutional.
A little more than a week later the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which offers legal guidance to the president, issued an opinion saying the opposite: that the M.S.P.B. should weigh in on the Article II cases. That was the guidance that Mr. Kerner was told in November he was bound to follow.
(The White House official said there was no connection between Ms. Comey’s termination and the O.L.C. opinion.)
In March, the Merit Systems Protection Board released its ruling. It did not follow the Office of Legal Counsel’s guidance to the letter; in fact, it explicitly stated it did not have to determine whether it was bound by the guidance.
Instead, the opinion said that the case of the immigration judges had been brought in a manner that would allow the board to consider the constitutional arguments therein without deciding other equivalent cases.
But the result was in line with the White House’s aims. For the first time in its history, the board took up a constitutional argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would invalidate its own existence, siding in favor of presidential power. Some federal employment specialists equated the ruling to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This month, the full Federal Circuit agreed to review the case, a highly unusual step underscoring the importance of the case.
“That was a monumental decision, reversing years of board law and determining who and who does not get board protections,” said Raymond Limon, a board member who left in February last year. “It is seismic.”
In the meantime, Mr. Sherk has moved on. This month, he was standing by in the Oval Office as Mr. Trump signed an executive order stripping job protections from nearly 8,000 workers in policy-making roles.
“Whose idea was that?” Mr. Trump asked. Told it was Mr. Sherk’s, he summoned him to the resolute desk to explain.
Mr. Sherk said that the order treated policymakers like private-sector workers. “If they’re messing up,” he said, “they can be removed quickly.”
“That’s great,” Mr. Trump said. “And you were very much involved in this?”
“I was, sir,” Mr. Sherk said.
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