US court says Trump can remove Democrats from two federal labor boards
By Daniel Wiessner
Dec 5 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday said President Donald Trump has the authority to remove Democratic members of two federal labor boards; It was a major victory in the Republican president’s effort to rein in institutions that were meant to be independent of the White House.
In its 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said federal laws allowing only cause-based removals of members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board violate the U.S. Constitution.
The D.C. Circuit reversed separate decisions by two judges who reappointed Cathy Harris to the merit board and Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. In May, the Supreme Court temporarily paused lower court decisions.
The NLRB hears labor disputes in the private sector, and the merit board decides appeals from federal employees who have been disciplined or fired. Because the merit board is often the only legal recourse for federal employees, 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 law allows them to be removed only for reasons such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or misconduct.
Trump fired Harris and Wilcox for no such reason in January; This was the first time a president fired a member of both agencies. He fired many other officials who often kept their jobs under a new administration, including members of other boards and inspectors general who inspected individual agencies for waste and corruption.
The Trump administration has argued that laws protecting officials from impeachment encroach on the broad powers the U.S. Constitution gives the president to control the executive branch.
The removals of Harris and Wilcox paralyzed both labor boards, which already had vacant seats, leaving them without enough members to decide individual cases. Hundreds of cases have been pending at the NLRB since Trump took office, and thousands of appeals have been filed with the merit board.
The issue is being watched closely by legal experts; Some of them say that removing the repeal protections would give Trump more direct control over regulations in areas as diverse as trade, energy, antitrust enforcement, finance and consumer product safety.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
