Trump Wins Independent Agency Firing Fight at DC Circuit (1)

A federal appeals court endorsed President Donald Trump’s firings of two independent agency officials despite their statutory safeguards against such at-will dismissals.

Members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board exercise the kind of executive power that makes their for-cause removal restrictions invalid under US Supreme Court precedent, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Friday.

The two Trump appointees in the three-judge DC Circuit panel handed Trump a win in his quest to expand presidential power and gain more control over independent agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve.

The decision comes days before the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over Trump’s firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. That case provides the high court with a chance to overturn its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. US, which had blessed the power of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire independent agency officials that wield quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial power.

But the DC Circuit majority didn’t need the death of Humphrey’s Executor to sign off on Trump’s terminations of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and MSPB member Cathy Harris.

Judges Gregory Katsas and Justin Walker suggested that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Seila Law v. CFPB had reinterpreted Humphrey’s Executor to the point that the president can fire officials without cause at any agency with substantial power. An agency’s quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial power “is and must be executive,” they said.

“Maybe Humphrey’s Executor thus governs only agencies with purely advisory functions—like, say, the United States Commission on Civil Rights,” Katsas wrote for the court.

Their musings on the nature of agency power aside, the Trump appointees said both the NLRB and MSPB exercise executive power. The agencies wield authority that goes beyond what the FTC had at its disposal when the Supreme Court decided Humphrey’s Executor, they said.

For example, both the NLRB and MSPB have rulemaking and litigation authority, Katsas and Walker said. The agencies also can order broader relief than the FTC was able to in 1935.

Given their agencies’ executive power, Congress can’t put conditions on when Trump could fire Wilcox and Harris without impinging on his constitutional power over the executive branch, according to the DC Circuit majority.

Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, dissented.

“Although my colleagues attempt to couch their analysis in narrow terms, they redefine the type of executive power that must be placed under the exclusive command of the President, and effectively grant him dominion over approximately thirty-three previously independent agencies,” Pan wrote.

The cases are Wilcox v. Trump, D.C. Cir., No. 25-5055, 12/5/25 and Harris v. Bessent, D.C. Cir., No. 25-05037, 12/5/25.