The government says lower courts are defying a high court order from May that permitted firings at independent labor boards.
President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court on July 14 to lift a lower court order blocking his firing of three Biden appointees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
The new legal filing is part of the president’s effort to remove personnel from independent federal agencies whose appointees traditionally have been shielded from termination without cause.
The supplementary brief in Trump v. Boyle comes after Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency application on behalf of the president on July 2 seeking to allow the terminations.
In May, Trump removed three members of the CPSC: Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr., all of whom had been appointed by President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox of Maryland blocked the firings, relying on a statute that he said insulates CPSC members from removal at will. Maddox countermanded Trump’s decision and ordered the three individuals reinstated.
The judge said removing three sitting members of the five-member commission “threatens severe impairment of [the commission’s] ability to fulfill its statutory mandates and advance the public’s interest in safe consumer products.”
The Trump administration asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to put a hold on Maddox’s order. On July 1, it declined to do so.
The commission members “never ceased to lawfully occupy their offices,” Circuit Judge James Wynn said.
“Permitting their unlawful removal would … deprive the public of the Commission’s full expertise and oversight.”
In the new brief, the government referenced the Supreme Court’s May 22 ruling in Trump v. Wilcox that allowed the president to fire members of independent labor boards.
In that case, the nation’s highest court formally blocked orders by two Washington-based federal judges that halted the president’s terminations of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board before their terms expired.
Sauer said in the July 14 brief that in this case, lower courts have refused to follow the Trump v. Wilcox precedent allowing firings of members of the MSPB and NLRB.
“Respondents now essentially embrace that defiance, dismissing Wilcox … as a non-binding advisory opinion and rehashing the same arguments that this Court rejected there when granting a stay,” Sauer said.
