On Wednesday, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court judgment that had temporarily reinstated three Democratic members of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), ruling that President Donald Trump has the power to dismiss them. A well-known legal dispute concerning presidential authority over independent federal agencies has come to a head with the 6 3 ruling, which was issued as part of an emergency order.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
A Biden appointee in Maryland, U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox, declared the terminations of Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr. illegal and ordered their restoration, which sparked the argument. The administration went to the Supreme Court after Trump’s legal team swiftly filed an appeal and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to halt Maddox’s decision.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer referenced a similar decision earlier this year in which the Supreme Court temporarily halted the restoration of members of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board in its emergency appeal. Sauer said that since the ruling directly governs this issue, precedent ought to apply here as well.
In response, the members of the CPSC argued that their sudden removal endangered the survival of an organization entrusted with protecting American customers’ safety. Claims of immediate or irreversible harm were also undermined by their observation that the Trump administration delayed four months before acting.
Judge Maddox previously decided that Article II of the Constitution, which outlines presidential powers, is not violated by the CPSC’s staggered, five-member board structure intended to foster independence. Restoring the board members while the lawsuit was still pending, he contended, may cause needless instability.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, points to a larger trend toward extending presidential power over independent agencies, which has been a recurrent topic in a number of recent court cases during the Trump administration. The 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor, which restricts a president’s power to dismiss independent regulators without reason, is at the heart of the discussion. According to legal experts, the conservative majority on the current Court seems more willing to review that established theory.
The decision ends the Supreme Court’s current term and gives Trump yet another legal victory as he continues to use his power to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
