DC Circuit hands Trump power to remove independent agency heads

Source: Courthouse News Service

December 5, 2025


WASHINGTON (CN) — A D.C. Circuit panel ruled Friday that President Donald Trump had the authority to unilaterally remove independent officials atop two labor boards earlier this year, further chipping away at legal precedents that long prevented such terminations. The three-judge panel ruled 2-1, finding that the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board were not protected by the landmark Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, and thus leadership could be removed without cause.

“Congress may not restrict the President’s ability to remove principal officers who wield substantial executive power,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas wrote. “As explained below, the NLRB and MSPB wield substantial powers that are both executive in nature and different from the powers that Humphrey’s Executor deemed to be merely quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial.”

Trump terminated MSPB Chair Cathy Harris and NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox in the early days of his second administration via two-sentence emails that provided no justification for their removal. A pair of federal judges deemed their terminations illegal, blasting Trump’s move as an overreach of his presidential authority to remove Democrat-appointed officials he viewed as opposing his agenda — both were appointed by former President Joe Biden, and Wilcox was the first Black woman to serve on the labor board.

Barack Obama-appointed U.S. District Judges Rudolph Contreras and Beryl Howell determined that the president could not terminate agency heads on a whim without just cause, which Congress specifically defined as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. Katsas, joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker in the decision, both Trump appointees, found that those removal protections did not apply to the NLRB and the MSPB because their exercise of significant executive power brought them under the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Board.

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