The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Thursday bolstered President Donald Trump’s bid to assume full control of executive branch agencies, giving a green light — for now — to his removal of the heads of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, whom he fired without cause.
A district court had sided with Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, concluding their firings from their independent agencies were likely illegal and must be reversed.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court granted Trump’s request for a stay of the lower court order to reinstate Harris and Wilcox, at least for now.
“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 majority explained.
The dispute is currently working its way through a federal court of appeals and may ultimately return to the Supreme Court on the merits.
Federal law and Supreme Court precedent explicitly prohibits the president from removing the heads of those independent, advisory agencies without cause in most cases — but conservatives and the administration have long argued that the rule is unconstitutional.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the decision.
“Today’s order favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument — and the passage of time — needed to discipline our decision-making,” Kagan wrote. “I would deny the President’s application. I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court’s seminal decision approving independent agencies’ for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation’s history.”
The case has been closely watched as one of the most high-profile tests of the president’s power to control independent agencies created by Congress and designed to be insulated from politics.
Special focus has been on the potential implications of the case for the Federal Reserve. Trump has made his displeasure of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell well-known and threatened to attempt to fire him, even though the appointment to chairman has historically been protected from presidential meddling without cause.
The Supreme Court’s majority nodded to those concerns in its order.
“Respondents Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee. We disagree,” the majority wrote. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
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