The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump may, for now, remove President Biden’s three appointees to the Consumer Product Safety Commission without cause.
The decision marks a further erosion of a 90-year-old precedent intended to safeguard the independence of certain regulatory agencies in deferrence to Executive Branch authority, NPR reported.
“The Consumer Product Safety Commission exercises executive power in a similar manner as the National Labor Relations Board, and the case does not otherwise differ from Wilcox in any pertinent respect,” the court said in its order.
In a concurrent order issued separately, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he would have granted the case for review this fall, NPR added.
All three of the high court’s liberals dissented.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing on behalf of herself and fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the majority for using the emergency docket to block Congress from restricting removals without cause. She warned that the decision effectively expands executive power at the expense of congressional authority.
“The majority has acted on the emergency docket—with ‘little time, scant briefing, and no argument’ — to override Congress’s decisions about how to structure administrative agencies so that they can perform their prescribed duties,” she wrote. “By means of such actions, this Court may facilitate the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”
Though temporary, the Court’s action directly challenges Humphrey’s Executor, the landmark 1935 Supreme Court decision that limited the president’s authority to remove agency officials at will, the outlet noted.
In that unanimous ruling, the Court held that President Franklin Roosevelt could not dismiss a Federal Trade Commission commissioner simply for opposing his New Deal policies. The justices concluded that when Congress establishes independent regulatory agencies like the FTC, it can shield their officials from removal except in cases of misconduct or other justifiable cause.
In 2021, President Biden appointed three commissioners to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the federal agency responsible for setting safety standards, overseeing product recalls, researching potential hazards, and occasionally banning dangerous products.
However, just months into his new term, President Trump dismissed the Biden-appointed commissioners before their terms had expired.
The commissioners filed a lawsuit in response, arguing that the president could not prematurely end their appointments without cause. Congress designed the consumer protection agency as “an independent regulatory commission,” they argued, and according to law, the president could only remove them for “neglect of duty of malfeasance in office.”
The Trump administration contended that the president, as the nation’s chief executive, has the authority to remove commissioners “at will,” arguing that they wield “substantial or considerable executive power.”
A federal judge in Maryland temporarily halted the Trump administration from removing the commissioners and ordered their reinstatement to their previous positions while the case continues in the lower courts.
After the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to step in, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, referencing a May ruling in which the justices, in a 6-3 decision, granted an emergency request allowing the administration to remove members of both the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
On Wednesday, the Court again sided with the administration, NPR added.
In May, the court ruled that Trump has the authority to fire two Democrat-appointed agency figures, again over the dissent of the high court’s three liberal justices.
However, the justices declined the Trump administration’s request to fast-track the case and fully review it this term, postponing a decision on whether the president has the authority to dismiss the two National Labor Relations Board officials permanently, The Hill reported.