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After DC Circuit reinstates fired agency board members, chief justice pauses action

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 9, 2025, 9:11 am CDT

Updated: Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily blocked reinstatement of fired board members of two independent agencies after an en banc federal appeals court ruled in their favor Monday.

On Wednesday, Roberts issued an administrative stay that paused reinstatement of Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne A. Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board, Law360 reports.

In its April 7 order, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated a three-judge panel decision that allowed Trump to remove Harris and Wilcox.

The NLRB enforces labor laws, while the MSPB considers workplace disputes by federal employees. Boards overseeing the agencies resolve appeals following decisions by administrative law judges.

The D.C. Circuit’s en banc order revived a reinstatement order by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell of the District of Columbia, Law.com reports.

The en banc court cited a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, and a 1958 Supreme Court decision, Wiener v. United States. Those decisions upheld restrictions on removal of government officials on multimember adjudicatory boards, the appeals court said.

“The Supreme Court’s repeated and recent statements that Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener remain precedential require denying the government’s emergency motions for a stay pending appeal,” the en banc majority said.

Four out of 11 en banc judges dissented.

The case is Trump v. Wilcox.

Updated April 9 at 4:17 p.m. to include information on Chief Justice John Roberts’ administrative stay.

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Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday once again swooped in at the eleventh hour to bail out the Trump administration, this time staying an appellate court order preventing the president from ousting two Biden-appointed members of independent federal labor agencies.

Roberts did not rule on the merits of the case, but stayed a lower court order that reinstated two chairwomen to their positions on independent federal labor boards in a case that is likely to have wide-reaching implications on Donald Trump’s continued effort to slash the government workforce and wield unprecedented control over the federal bureaucracy.

The chief justice’s order was handed down within hours of the Justice Department filing a petition urging the high court to intervene after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., affirmed a lower court order reinstating Cathy A. Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The appeals court previously reasoned that the fired chairwomen were improperly dismissed without cause, violating federal law.

Meanwhile, the administration has argued that prohibiting the president from selecting personnel in the executive branch impedes his ability to do his job, asserting, “this situation is untenable.”

“This case raises a constitutional question of profound importance: whether the President can supervise and control agency heads who exercise vast executive power on the President’s behalf, or whether Congress may insulate those agency heads from presidential control by preventing the President from removing them at will,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the 39-page petition. “[T]he district court’s orders violate Article II on an independent and equally troubling basis. Federal courts lack any constitutional, statutory, or equitable authority to order the reinstatement of agency heads whom the President has removed and to force the President to rely on principal officers whom the President believes should not be exercising any executive power. Exercising non-existent equitable authority to saddle the President with already-removed principal officers ‘deeply wounds the President’ in his exercise of the executive power.”

A member of the Merit Systems Protection Board who was removed by President Donald Trump earlier this year has asked for an appellate court to reconsider its opinion allowing her firing to go forward.

On Feb. 10, the 45th and 47th president tried to fire Cathy Harris, a Joe Biden appointee whose term expires in 2028, in an email from an assistant, telling her she was “terminated, effective immediately.”

Harris sued in Washington, D.C., and days later won her job back through a temporary restraining order issued in February — and then a permanent injunction which was issued earlier this month — by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, a Barack Obama appointee.

On Friday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling in the government’s favor, staying the injunction. The ruling allows Trump to fire both Harris and National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox — who had also won reprieve from a politically-motivated firing at the district court level.

A Democratic member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent administrative agency tasked with administering “labor-management relations” for over 2 million government workers, was “unlawfully removed” by President Donald Trump last month, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Susan Tsui Grundmann, who was axed on Feb. 11, has been suing the Trump administration for what she claims was an “unconstitutional” removal from the FLRA, which is a three-member agency charged by Congress with “managing federal labor relations” in an “unbiased” and “fair” way that she says is not supposed to “shift with political whims.” With Grundmann in, the FLRA would have a 2-1 Democratic majority until her term expires in July.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan handed down her ruling in the case — siding with Grundmann and her argument that Trump’s firing of her was “unlawful” — after the Justice Department argued Article II of the Constitution gave Trump the power to remove executive branch officials without cause, including members of the FLRA.

“The Government vigorously defends Ms. Grundmann’s hasty termination on the basis that the Constitution vests the entirety of the ‘executive Power’ in the President,” Sooknanan said. “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances. Our Founders recognized that the concentration of power in one branch of government would spell disaster.”

An employee of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired by President Donald Trump is firing back in court with a federal lawsuit, calling her removal “unprecedented and illegal.”

Gwynne A. Wilcox called her Jan. 27 firing by late-night email a blatant violation of the National Labor Relations Act, which allows the president to remove board members only in cases of “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause,” and only after “notice and hearing,” according to the complaint.

“The President’s unprecedented removal of Ms. Wilcox defies 90 years of Supreme Court precedent that has ensured the independence of critical government agencies,” Deepak Gupta, an attorney for Wilcox, said in a statement. “Federal law is clear: The members of the National Labor Relations Board may only be removed for neglect of duty or misconduct, and only after a notice and a hearing. The President has violated the law.”

A French teacher has settled with the Virginia school board that fired him for refusing to use a transgender boy’s pronouns.

Peter Vlaming will receive $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, said his legal team at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right advocacy organization known for filing lawsuits aimed at rolling back the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people.

“I was wrongfully fired from my teaching job because my religious beliefs put me on a collision course with school administrators who mandated that teachers ascribe to only one perspective on gender identity — their preferred view,” he said in a statement. “I loved teaching French and gracefully tried to accommodate every student in my class, but I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience. I’m very grateful for the work of my attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to bring my case to victory, and hope it helps protect every other teacher and professor’s fundamental First Amendment rights.”

More Law&Crime coverage: Pair of Trump-appointed federal judges blocks Biden efforts to protect transgender students

West Point Public Schools Superintendent Larry Frazier told Newport News outlet The Daily Press that “we are pleased to be able to reach a resolution that will not have a negative impact on the students, staff or school community of West Point.”

The Virginia Supreme Court last December reinstated Vlaming’s lawsuit, which the Circuit Court of King William County had previously dismissed.

“[N]o government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs,” the decision also said. The judges found that the lower court “erred dismissing this claim on demurrer on the ground that Vlaming’s factual allegations, even if assumed to be true, were insufficient as a matter of law to state a free-exercise claim” under Virginia law.