An appeals court has cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire two officials at independent workforce agencies, at least temporarily, delivering a legal win to the White House as it tries to expand executive power.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay blocking the reinstatement of the two fired officials, Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. Trump removed the two Democrats from office shortly after his inauguration.
Both Wilcox and Harris filed lawsuits arguing their firings were unlawful and won temporary reinstatement from federal judges. But the appellate ruling Friday reverses those orders and allows the terminations to take effect while the litigation moves forward.
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In the decision, Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote that Trump was likely to succeed in arguing that the legal protections blocking the president from removing Wilcox and Harris from office were unconstitutional.
“The Government has also shown that it will suffer irreparable harm each day the President is deprived of the ability to control the executive branch,” Walker wrote.
Walker was joined in the ruling by Judge Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of President George H. W. Bush. Judge Patricia Millett, an appointee of President Barack Obama, dissented.
The ruling is significant because it robs both agencies, which adjudicate workplace disputes, of the quorums they need to function and issue decisions.
The NLRB, which enforces private-sector collective bargaining law, will have only two members on its five-member board. The MSPB, which protects federal workers against unfair firings, will have only one member on its three-member board.
“That decision will leave languishing hundreds of unresolved legal claims that the Political Branches jointly and deliberately channeled to these expert adjudicatory entities,” Millett wrote in her dissent.
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The logic behind the decision also has sweeping implications for other agencies since it grants the president broad power to remove officials he doesn’t like at independent, quasi-judicial bodies. Trump has defied Supreme Court precedent and fired Democratic officials at several such agencies in an effort to bring them under White House control.
Millett wrote that the majority’s rationale in Friday’s order “openly calls into question the constitutionality of dozens of federal statutes” that protect officials at independent agencies from the president’s whims.