The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that President Trump is currently permitted to dismiss President Biden’s three appointees to the Consumer Product Safety Commission without justification.
This ruling signifies a further decline of a 90-year-old precedent designed to protect the autonomy of specific regulatory bodies in deference to the authority of the Executive Branch, as reported by NPR.
“The Consumer Product Safety Commission wields executive power in a manner akin to the National Labor Relations Board, and the case does not differ from Wilcox in any significant way,” the court stated in its ruling.
In a separate concurrent order, Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed that he would have favored granting the case for review this fall, as noted by NPR.
All three liberal justices on the high court dissented.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing on behalf of herself and her fellow liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the majority for utilizing the emergency docket to prevent Congress from limiting removals without cause. She cautioned that this ruling effectively broadens executive power at the cost of congressional authority.
“The majority has acted on the emergency docket—with ‘little time, scant briefing, and no argument’—to override Congress’s decisions regarding the structuring of administrative agencies so that they can fulfill their designated responsibilities,” she wrote. “Through such actions, this Court may enable the gradual transfer of authority, piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”
Although temporary, the Court’s decision directly contests Humphrey’s Executor, the pivotal 1935 Supreme Court ruling that restricted the president’s power to remove agency officials at will, as noted by the outlet.
In that unanimous decision, the Court determined that President Franklin Roosevelt was not permitted to remove a commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission merely for disagreeing with his New Deal initiatives. The justices concluded that when Congress creates independent regulatory bodies such as the FTC, it can protect their officials from dismissal except in instances of misconduct or other valid reasons.
In 2021, President Biden appointed three commissioners to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the federal agency tasked with establishing safety standards, managing product recalls, investigating potential dangers, and occasionally prohibiting hazardous products.
However, just a few months into his new term, President Trump dismissed the commissioners appointed by Biden before their terms were completed.
In response, the commissioners initiated a lawsuit, contending that the president could not terminate their appointments prematurely without just cause. They argued that Congress designed the consumer protection agency as “an independent regulatory commission,” and according to the law, the president could only remove them for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
The Trump administration argued that the president, as the chief executive of the nation, possesses the authority to remove commissioners “at will,” asserting that they exercise “substantial or considerable executive power.”
A federal judge in Maryland temporarily prevented the Trump administration from dismissing the commissioners and mandated their reinstatement to their former roles while the case proceeds through the lower courts.
After the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals chose not to intervene, the Trump administration sought recourse from the Supreme Court, citing a May ruling in which the justices, in a 6-3 decision, granted an emergency request that allowed the administration to remove members of both the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
On Wednesday, the Court once again favored the administration, as reported by NPR.
