High Court Deals Blow to Agency Officials Fighting Trump Firings

Independent agency officials removed by President Donald Trump will have a harder time winning legal challenges after the US Supreme Court blocked the reinstatement of fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority signaled to lower courts Thursday that it takes a narrow view of the exceptions to what it sees as broad presidential power to dismiss independent agency officials, consistent with what the Trump administration has argued, legal scholars said.

“The court is giving marching orders of a sort here,” said Neal Devins, a law professor at the College of William & Mary who’s written about independent agencies. “You don’t have to be very good at reading tea leaves to read these tea leaves.”

The high court’s comments on presidential removal power came in an order granting the administration’s request to stay decisions that would have put NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and MSPB member Cathy Harris back to work. Blocking their reinstatements means both of those adjudicatory agencies will continue to lack enough members for a quorum, so they can’t issue decisions.

Trump’s firing authority is a key element of his bid to expand power over agencies that previously operated outside of direct White House control. The ability to remove noncompliant officials would give teeth to his executive order taking control of independent agencies, including how they interpret the law.

“The whole idea of having independent bodies of experts insulated from political pressure is so they can make the best decisions possible,” said Jane Manners, a law professor and legal historian at Temple University. “We need fair, neutral arbiters to make these complex administrative systems run effectively, otherwise it’s going to be politics all the way down.”

Independent agency officials challenging their terminations have found early success. Officials fired from at least four agencies have prevailed at the district court level, with judges finding that their for-cause removal protections prohibited Trump from firing them.

And a judge appointed by George W. Bush ruled this week that members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board were illegally fired, even though they didn’t have explicit statutory safeguards limiting when they could be removed.

Officials from the Federal Trade Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have also filed lawsuits contesting their dismissals.

Shrinking Humphrey’s Executor

The Supreme Court’s two-page unsigned order, which was joined by the six Republican-appointed justices, emphasized that the court hasn’t made a final decision on whether Trump could dump Wilcox and Harris.

The high court endorsed Congress’ ability to place restrictions on presidential firing power in its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. FTC. But in the last 15 years, the court has issued a trio of decisions narrowing agency officials’ for-cause removal protections.

The Trump administration has argued that the court’s 2020 decision in Seila Law v. CFPB redefined Humphrey’s Executor so that agency officials who exercise substantial executive power are subject to at-will removals.

The administration has pushed for a shrunken version of Humphrey’s Executor by also articulating a broad view of what counts as executive power. During oral argument at an appeals court this month, a Justice Department lawyer cited members of the Administrative Conference of the United States—an advisory group with no regulatory or enforcement power—as its sole example of an official that doesn’t exercise substantial executive power.

The Supreme Court said in its Thursday order blocking the reinstatements of Wilcox and Harris that it believes that the administration “is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.”

Giving a ‘Green Light’

One piece of the Supreme Court’s order that could have the most impact—in part because it’s just one sentence without explanation—is a statement that the Constitution gives the president the power to remove officials, subject to “narrow exceptions,” said Jed Shugerman, a law professor and legal historian at Boston University.

That sentence could be read to say anyone in the executive branch is removable at-will, including the 2 million federal workers shielded by civil service protections that have existed for 150 years, he said.

“This appeal gave the Roberts court an opportunity to give a green light, a yellow light, or a red light,” Shugerman said. “This opinion is basically a green light to President Trump, which effectively says we are weak and we’re giving permission and a structure for you to keep doing what you’re doing.”

But the high court’s signal to lower courts is very weak precedentially, because it comes in an order that’s just two-pages long and doesn’t contain much legal analysis, said Christine Chabot, a Marquette University law professor who focuses on agency and judicial independence, separation of powers, and the history of the administrative state.

“It’s like they’ve made an uneducated decision,” so lower courts can still issue “educated decisions” that Humphrey’s Executor protects agency officials, Chabot said.

The case is Trump v. Wilcox, U.S., No. 24A966, 5/22/25.