Supreme Court allows Trump to fire members of agency boards

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Trump to remove two members of federal independent labor boards while legal proceedings over their firings move forward.

The high court granted a request for emergency relief from the Trump administration to pause a pair of lower court rulings that voided Mr. Trump’s removals of Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board.

“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents,” the court said. “The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power. But we do not ultimately decide in this posture whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within such a recognized exception; that question is better left for resolution after full briefing and argument.”