From left to right, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, Mary Boyle and Richard Trumka Jr. of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Courtesy: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission
The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to fire members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency set up by Congress to be independent of political pressures.
The justices, granting an emergency request filed by the Trump administration, blocked a Maryland-based federal judge’s ruling that reinstated Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr., all of whom had been appointed by then-President Joe Biden.
Without the three members in place, the five-member commission would for now lack the necessary quorum to fulfill its obligation to protect consumers from defective products.
Under existing law, members can only be removed for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” but Trump went ahead and fired members anyway, as he has done at other agencies with similar restrictions as part of his aggressive efforts to reshape the federal government.
The Supreme Court in May allowed him to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, casting aside precedent dating back to 1935 that upheld removal protections.
The unsigned order on Wednesday said that the latest case was “squarely controlled” by what the high court decided then.
As in the previous case, the three liberal justices on the conservative-majority court dissented.
“Once again, this court uses its emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as established by Congress,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan.
In ruling against Trump, lower court judges relied on the 1935 precedent, a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which the Supreme Court has not overturned but has signaled it will in due course.
The court has in recent rulings undermined the 1935 precedent by saying that similar restrictions on presidential power involving other agencies are unconstitutional because they infringe on the core constitutional powers of the president.
In 2020, the court ruled on those grounds in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director and followed that up with a similar ruling a year later concerning the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Trump in May moved to fire the three Consumer Product Safety Commission members. A month later, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Maddox ordered that they be reinstated and they returned to their jobs while litigation continued.
The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put Maddox’s ruling on hold.
The commission, set up in 1972 by Congress, oversees a wide variety of consumer product issues, including safety standards and research into injury prevention.
In order to insulate the commission from politics, Congress gave the members staggered seven-year terms, stipulated that only three could represent the same political party and said the president could not fire them at will.
All five members are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate and expected to have expertise on consumer product safety issues.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in court papers that Maddox’s ruling has “sown chaos and dysfunction” at the agency, with the reinstated members moving to undo actions that the commission took after they were initially fired.
Lawyers for the commission members wrote in their own filing that the court would be adding to the disruption if it allowed their clients to be removed from office a second time. In some cases, the three commissioners have been “undoing actions that the CPSC unlawfully took” during the time they were prevented from working, the lawyers added.
