Trump’s Firing of Federal Privacy Board Democrats Reinstated

The Trump administration’s effort to fire two Democratic members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board can move forward temporarily after the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday put on hold a lower court order blocking their removal while litigation proceeds.

The US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that a law must explicitly restrict the president’s removal powers to provide principal officers protection from termination, and the statute creating the privacy board doesn’t do so, the court said in an unsigned order.

The lower court reasoned that the privacy board was structured like other multimember independent agencies whose officials are shielded from being fired under the US Supreme Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Therefore, Congress also intended to forbid the president from firing privacy board members at will, the district court said.

But the appellate panel disagreed, saying that the board doesn’t have adjudicatory functions, and so its members don’t have implied at-will protections.

And Humphrey’s Executor was recently called into question when the US Supreme Court paused lower court injunctions that protected the jobs of National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board members.

The Supreme Court concluded that the government’s harm from a disfavored officer exercising executive power weighed more than the board member’s harm from termination. “We can discern no reason why this balance would be different in the case of removed PCLOB members than it is in cases of removed NLRB or MSPB members,” the D.C. Circuit said.

Judges Gregory G. Katsas, Neomi Rao and Justin R. Walker issued the decision.

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP represents the removed board members.

The case is LeBlanc v. US Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Bd., D.C. Cir., No. 25-05197, 7/1/25.