Federal employees urge Supreme Court to keep order in place preventing their firing

Three members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission who were fired by President Donald Trump in May urged the Supreme Court on Friday to leave in place an order by a federal judge in Maryland that required the Trump administration to reinstate them to their jobs. Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka, all of whom were appointed to the commission by then-President Joe Biden, told the justices that although the federal government attempted “to paint a picture of chaos at the agency” in its own Supreme Court filing, it instead “simply describe[d] the Commissioners performing official functions that the district court held they were lawfully entitled to perform and, in some instances, undoing actions that the CPSC unlawfully took without a quorum.”

Established more than a half-century ago, the CPSC describes its mission as working “to save lives and keep families safe by reducing the unreasonable risk of injuries associated with consumer products.” It has five commissioners, no more than three of whom “may be affiliated with the same political party,” and the president can remove a commissioner only “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office but for no other cause.”

On May 8, Boyle and Trumka received emails from the White House informing them that they had been fired. Hoehn-Saric learned the next day from the CPSC chair, Peter Feldman, that he would also be fired.

At a White House briefing on May 9, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to questions about the firings by telling reporters that Trump “has the right to fire people within the executive branch. It’s a pretty simple answer.”

The three commissioners went to federal court, where they argued that Trump’s attempt to fire them without good cause violated the law.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox agreed and ordered the Trump administration to reinstate them. He relied on the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor, which carved out an exception to the general principle that the president can fire subordinates for any reason and held that Congress can create independent, multi-member regulatory agencies whose commissioners can only be removed for cause.

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit rejected the government’s request to temporarily freeze Maddox’s order, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer came to the Supreme Court on July 2, asking the justices to intervene. He argued that a ruling by the Supreme Court in late May allowing Trump to fire members of two other multi-member agencies, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, should govern this case and permit the CPSC firings, as well. Maddox’s ruling, Sauer contended, “has sown chaos and dysfunction at the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”

Sauer also sought an administrative stay – that is, an order from the Supreme Court pausing Maddox’s order while the justices considered the administration’s bid to freeze it going forward. The justices have not acted on that request.

In their filing on Friday afternoon, the three commissioners told the justices that the relief that the government seeks – clearing the way for the Trump administration to remove them – would “disrupt the status quo.” They noted that they served in their jobs for four months without any complaints before Trump attempted to fire them, and that they have been back at work since June 13, but the government did not come to the Supreme Court for nearly two weeks after the 4th Circuit declined to act on its request for an administrative stay. That “lack of urgency reflects,” they concluded, the government’s “lack of irreparable harm” from leaving them in their jobs.

The commissioners also resisted the government’s efforts to rely on the court’s rulings in the cases involving members of the NLRB and the MSPB. In this case, they stressed, Maddox ruled that the “structure and function” of the CPSC “‘closely resemble[]’ those of the agency described in Humphrey’s Executor and that the CPSC’s statutory tenure protections, like those upheld in Humphrey’s Executor, “are accordingly constitutional” – the same conclusion, they observed, reached by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th and 10th Circuits.

Finally, the commissioners urged the justices to deny the Trump administration’s request to grant review of Maddox’s ruling before the 4th Circuit has a chance to weigh in. Emphasizing that such grants are “extremely rare,” the commissioners reiterated that the court had declined a similar appeal in the cases involving the NLRB and MSPB commissioners. “The only subsequent development that the government identifies,” they wrote, “is that courts have continued to resolve challenges to allegedly unlawful terminations on the basis of existing law.”