Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Supreme Court Lets Trump Move Forward With Firing Agency Leaders For Now

Wikimedia Commons/Joe Ravi

President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow him to move forward with firing two agency leaders.

Chief Justice John Roberts put the lower court orders temporarily on hold Wednesday, ordering a response to the administration’s application by April 15.

The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to halt lower court orders keeping two officials Trump fired in place while it considers the bigger constitutional question surrounding removal protections for certain agency leaders.

“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 wrote in the administration’s application.

The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 7–4 on Monday to reverse a panel decision permitting Trump to fire Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board.

The decision cited the Supreme Court’s Humphrey’s Executor v. United States ruling in 1935 and Wiener v. United States ruling in 1958, where it “unanimously upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember adjudicatory boards.”

The administration asked the justices to treat its application as a writ of certiorari before judgement to settle the constitutional questions involved in the dispute.

“This case raises a constitutional question of profound importance: whether the President can supervise and control agency heads who exercise vast executive power on the President’s behalf, or whether Congress may insulate those agency heads from presidential control by preventing the President from removing them at will,” the application states.

The application suggests that the justices hold oral arguments in May rather than waiting until next term, which could leave several agencies “under a legal cloud until 2026, and the President might be forced to continue entrusting executive power to fired officers for more than a quarter of his four-year term.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect Chief Justice John Roberts’ temporary hold on the injunctions against the Trump administration.