Chief Justice lets Trump fire 2 officials; Fed Chair Powell's job at risk?

US Chief Justice John Roberts allows Trump to remove two agency heads as the Supreme Court takes up a case that could ultimately affect the job security of Fed Chair Jerome Powell

By Greg Stohr

 

US Chief Justice John Roberts let President Donald Trump temporarily oust top officials at two independent agencies while the Supreme Court decides how to handle a new showdown over presidential power.

 

Roberts’ order Wednesday puts on hold a federal appeals court decision that had let National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris go back to work. Roberts said his order will last until either he or the full court issues a longer-term decision.

 

The case is testing a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that let Congress shield high-ranking officials from being fired, paving the way for the independent agencies that now proliferate across the US government. The legal wrangling ultimately could affect whether Trump has the power to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. 

 

Trump earlier Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to let him remove the two officials while a legal fight goes forward. He also said the justices should take the unusual step of granting full review without waiting for a final ruling from the appeals court. 

 

“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued. Sauer is the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer.

 

Roberts asked the two officials to respond to Trump’s request by April 15. He is the justice assigned to handle emergency matters involving the federal appeals court in Washington.

 

Humphrey’s Executor 

The Supreme Court in recent years has chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, as the New Deal-era ruling is known. The court said in 2020 that the president could fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for any reason, striking down job protections Congress had created for that position. The court said the Constitution’s separation of powers precluded an arrangement that left such a powerful executive branch figure unaccountable to the president.

 

The key question in the Harris and Wilcox cases is whether the same reasoning applies to multi-member agencies. Wilcox was replaced as NLRB chair by Trump on Jan. 20 and fired a week later. Harris was serving as chair of the merit board when Trump removed her in early February.

 

Sauer said in his filing Wednesday that the administration plans to ask the court to overrule Humphrey’s Executor if necessary to allow Harris and Wilcox to be fired.

 

The administration is also defending against a lawsuit by two Democratic FTC commissioners fired by Trump. That case could pose an even more direct challenge to Humphrey’s Executor.

 

Trump’s removal of Harris and Wilcox leaves their respective agencies — the three-member MSPB and the five-member NLRB — without a quorum to function. The merit board handles labor-related claims from US agency employees and recently has presided over challenges to Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce.