Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Fire Agency Leaders (1)

President Donald Trump asked the US Supreme Court to let him fire top officials at two independent agencies, filing an emergency request that could bolster White House control over federal regulators.

The filing comes after a federal appeals court on Monday said National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris can stay in their jobs while a legal fight plays out.

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 test whether Trump has the power to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Trump asked the Supreme Court to let him immediately fire the two officials and also to take the unusual step of granting full review without waiting for a final ruling from the appeals court. The administration said the high court should hold a special sitting in May so it could consider the case in its current term, which runs through late June or early July.

“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.

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.

The Trump administration said in February it would push to get Humphrey’s Executor overturned or at least sharply limited.

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.

The case is Trump v. Wilcox, 24A966.

(Updates with except from filing in fifth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Zoe Tillman.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Peter Jeffrey

© 2025 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.