Overview

• The Supreme Court issued a 6-3 unsigned emergency stay permitting President Trump to remove Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board.
• The decision temporarily blocks lower court rulings that reinstated the two Biden-appointed officials, pending further litigation on the constitutional limits of presidential removal power.
• The majority reasoned that the president has broad authority to remove executive officers who exercise executive power on his behalf, citing narrow exceptions in prior precedent.
• The dissenting justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the ruling for undermining long-standing protections for independent agencies.
• The firings leave both agencies without quorums, disrupting their ability to resolve labor and civil-service disputes, as broader questions about agency independence and separation of powers remain unresolved.