WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the D.C. Circuit court today in Wilcox v. Trump and Harris v. Bessent, cases in which the court is considering whether to grant an emergency stay of the district court orders in the cases involving President Trump’s attempted firings of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) Chair Cathy Harris, Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) Senior Appellate Counsel Smita Ghosh issued the following reaction:  

This case involves an unprecedented claim for essentially unlimited presidential control over independent agencies, as the government’s counsel made clear this morning when he suggested that the President’s removal authority is so broad that Congress could not even prohibit the President from firing agency heads based on gender or age.

And as CAC’s briefs in these cases demonstrate, there is simply no basis in Supreme Court precedent, historical practice, or constitutional text and history for the exceptionally broad removal power for which the government is arguing. Because of the absence of support for the government’s position, it cannot establish a likelihood of success on the merits, let alone a strong one, and it is not entitled to a stay pending appeal.

CAC Legal Fellow Margaret Hassel added this reaction: 

For 150 years, Congress has entrusted expert boards, like the NLRB and MSPB, with authority over issues ranging from labor to energy to monetary policy. As Judge Millett pointed out today, the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed that Congress may protect the leaders of these agencies from arbitrary, political removal, as long as the agency is led by a multimember board. Those precedents support the district court judges’ decisions to keep Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris in their offices, as does a century and a half of history. The D.C. Circuit should let those decisions stand while these cases are appealed.