By Daniel Wiessner
Dec 5 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday said President Donald Trump had the power to fire Democratic members of two federal labor boards, a major victory in the Republican president’s bid to rein in agencies meant to be independent from the White House.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision said federal laws allowing members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board to be removed only for cause violated the U.S. Constitution.
The D.C. Circuit reversed separate rulings by two judges that had reinstated Cathy Harris to the merit board and Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. The Supreme Court in May temporarily paused the lower court rulings.
The NLRB hears private-sector labor disputes and the merit board decides appeals by federal employees who have been disciplined or fired. Because the merit board is often the only legal recourse for federal workers, it could have a key role in reviewing Trump’s efforts to purge the federal workforce.
Members of both agencies are appointed by the president, but federal laws allow them to be removed only for cause including inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance.
Trump fired Harris and Wilcox without such cause in January, the first time a president had removed a member of either agency. He has removed many other officials who would typically keep their jobs in a new administration, including members of other boards and inspectors general who police individual agencies for waste and corruption.
The Trump administration has argued that laws shielding the officials from removal encroach on the broad powers that the U.S. Constitution grants the president to control the executive branch.
The removal of Harris and Wilcox has paralyzed both labor boards, which already had vacant seats, by depriving them of enough members to decide individual cases. Hundreds of cases are pending at the NLRB and thousands of appeals have been filed with the merit board since Trump took office.
The issue is being watched closely by legal experts, some of whom say that striking down removal protections would give Trump more direct control over regulation of various areas including trade, energy, antitrust enforcement, finance, and consumer product safety.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
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