A federal appeals court in Washington voted Monday to reinstate the heads of two independent government agencies that oversee labor disputes, extending a legal standoff touched off by President Trump’s attempt to fire them.
The boards work to protect the rights of federal employees and unionized workers, and the once-obscure bodies have been thrust into the spotlight as Mr. Trump moves quickly to cut thousands of jobs and strip federal workers of the protections that have proven obstacles to his downsizing efforts.
The decision hinged on a contested legal precedent that shields the officers of these types of boards from political pressure by preventing them from being removed without cause. It tees up an expected finale in which the Supreme Court will be asked to issue the final word on whether Mr. Trump can unilaterally shake up the boards’ leadership.
By a 7-4 vote, the court voided an earlier decision by a divided three-judge panel that had cleared the way for the Trump administration to remove Cathy Harris and Gwynne A. Wilcox — both appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — from their posts at the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board.
Both women found themselves targets of the president amid his broader campaign to centralize power and eliminate constraints on his ability to fire federal workers and decimate the federal service.
Mr. Trump and his advisers have faced a raft of legal challenges over their attempts to fire federal workers en masse, practically eliminate entire agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development, and end collective bargaining with federal unions.
Mr. Trump and many of his closest advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, came to see the federal bureaucracy as one of the major impediments to his agenda during his first term. In seeking to remove Ms. Harris, Ms. Wilcox and others in similar positions, he has worked to sideline any stumbling blocks to cutting through that bureaucracy in his second term.
In a concise three-page opinion, the majority wrote that the legal precedent from 1935 set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States still required it to afford certain protections to the heads of agencies created by Congress to serve as nonpartisan adjudicatory bodies. They reasoned that until the high court advised otherwise, Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox could not be summarily removed.
By design, both boards are made up of members serving longer stints than a four-year presidential term in order to encourage a nonpartisan makeup and keep the independent agencies insulated from political pressures. Members of the M.S.P.B. are confirmed by the Senate to serve for one nonrenewable seven-year term, and members of the N.L.R.B. serve for five years.
The legal arguments over their fate mirrored the earlier case of Hampton Dellinger, whose job involved investigating the claims of federal workers who believed they had been wrongfully terminated. Mr. Trump removed him in February.
Mr. Dellinger’s lawsuit challenging his removal was the first to reach the Supreme Court, which halted his imminent suspension but did not resolve the underlying questions about the president’s power to remove Mr. Dellinger and those serving in similar positions. In March, Mr. Dellinger decided to abandon the legal struggle to remain in his position.
In a series of much longer dissenting opinions, the judges who voted against the reinstatement wrote that the decision trampled on the president’s ability to carry out his agenda. They wrote that the precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor has been significantly eroded over time, and that the decision forced the boards to accept Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox back on the job after they had already been sidelined from their positions for weeks.
“Harris and Wilcox are no longer in office,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote in a dissenting opinion. “The district court purported to reinstate these officers by simply declaring they were never removed in the first place and ordering executive branch officials to play along.”
The order on Monday also denied a request by the government to pause the reinstatement for seven days in order to allow the government time to lodge an appeal with the Supreme Court.
