US court lets Trump remove Democrats from labor boards, for now
Source: Reuters
March 28, 2025 3:31 PM EDT Updated 15 min ago
March 28 (Reuters) - Donald Trump can - for now - remove Democratic members from two federal labor boards, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday, handing the Republican president a victory in his efforts to bring independent federal agencies under his control.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision paused rulings by two judges who had found that Trump's removal of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board was unlawful, pending the outcome of the Justice Department's appeals.
Without Wilcox and Harris, the five-member NLRB and three-member Merit Systems Protection Board will not have enough members to decide cases, bringing the work of the agencies to a standstill. The White House, the agencies, and lawyers for Harris and Wilcox did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Like several other agencies, the labor boards were set up by Congress to be independent from the president in order to maintain impartiality when they decide individual cases. Congress passed laws giving job protections to members of these boards, allowing them to be fired by a president only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office" and, in the case of the merit board, also for inefficiency. The Trump administration acknowledged violating these laws, but said the protections from removal for members of the two boards ran afoul of the powers given to the president under the U.S. Constitution.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-lets-trump-remove-democrats-labor-boards-now-2025-03-28/
The cases are still being litigated the stay has been lifted.
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