Supreme Court sides with Trump, for now, on firing agencies’ leaders

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday temporarily let the Trump administration remove the leaders of two independent agencies while their challenges to their dismissals move forward in court.

The chief justice, acting on his own, issued an “administrative stay,” an interim measure meant to give the justices some breathing room while the full Supreme Court considers the matter. He ordered the officials to file briefs in their cases by Tuesday.

Roberts’ order came in response to an emergency application from the administration that had asked the court to pause an appeals court ruling requiring the officials’ reinstatements.

The administration also asked the court to grant review of the cases and schedule arguments at a special session of the court in May, with a decision to follow by July.

“We acknowledge the concerns surrounding litigating and deciding the important questions raised by these cases on such a short timeline,” wrote D. John Sauer, the solicitor general.

But he said the alternative was unacceptable, as it would allow the two agencies, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board, to be overseen by officials hostile to the administration’s goals.

“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” Sauer wrote.

If the Supreme Court does not act, he wrote, “the president might be forced to continue entrusting executive power to fired officers for more than a quarter of his four-year term.”

The emergency application was the latest in a series of requests asking the Supreme Court to step in after federal judges blocked the administration’s initiatives on personnel, spending, immigration and citizenship. The court’s rulings on such requests to date have been tentative and technical.

The administration’s emergency application seeks a more categorical ruling, taking aim at a foundational 90-year-old legal precedent that said Congress can limit the president’s power to fire the heads of agencies and so shield them from politics.

Some conservative justices have said they would overrule the precedent, arguing that it unconstitutionally infringed on the power of the president to lead the executive branch. That could significantly expand President Donald Trump’s ability to fire the leaders of agencies without cause despite laws requiring a good reason for the terminations.