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 of the White House.
The US 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 the Merit Systems Protection Board to be removed only for cause violated the US Constitution.
The DC Circuit reversed separate two-judge decisions that reinstated Cathy Harris to the merits panel and Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. The Supreme Court in May temporarily stayed the lower court’s 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 workers, it could play a key role in reviewing Trump’s efforts to gut 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 abuse.
Trump fired Harris and Wilcox without cause in January, the first time a president had removed a member of any agency. He removed many other officials who typically keep their jobs in a new administration, including members of other boards and inspectors general who probe individual agencies for waste and corruption.
The Trump administration has argued that laws protecting officials from removal encroach on the broad powers the US Constitution gives the president to control the executive branch.
The removal of Harris and Wilcox crippled 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 merits board since Trump took office.
The issue is being closely watched by legal experts, some of whom say removing the takedown protections would give Trump more direct control over the regulation of several 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)