The Supreme Court on July 23 allowed President Donald Trump to fire three Biden appointees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission for now.
The new ruling in Trump v. Boyle lifts a lower court order blocking the dismissals, allowing litigation over the firings to continue in the lower courts.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the ruling.
In May, Trump removed three members of the commission: Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr., all of whom had been appointed by President Joe Biden.
Judge Matthew Maddox, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, blocked the firings, relying on a statute that he said insulates commission members from removal at will. Maddox countermanded Trump’s decision and ordered the three individuals reinstated.
The judge said removing three sitting members of the five-member commission “threatens severe impairment of [the commission’s] ability to fulfill its statutory mandates and advance the public’s interest in safe consumer products.”
The Trump administration asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to put a hold on Maddox’s order. On July 1, it declined to do so.
In the Supreme Court application the government filed on July 2, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the three individuals’ continued presence on the commission has been disruptive.
“In light of the untenable chaos caused by respondents’ court-ordered takeover of the CPSC, by respondents’ aggressive efforts to wield executive power while stay proceedings remain ongoing, and by one of the reinstated Commissioner’s threats to take action against staff members who do not carry out his directives, this Court’s prompt intervention is needed,” the application said.
Sauer referenced the Supreme Court’s May 22 ruling in Trump v. Wilcox, which allowed the president to fire members of independent labor boards.
In that case, the court formally blocked orders by two Washington-based federal judges that halted the president’s terminations of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board before their terms expired.
Sauer said in a July 14 brief that lower courts have refused to follow the Trump v. Wilcox precedent.
“Respondents now essentially embrace that defiance, dismissing Wilcox … as a non-binding advisory opinion and rehashing the same arguments that this Court rejected there when granting a stay,” he said.
An advisory opinion is a court ruling that offers guidance on a legal issue but does not resolve a specific case.
In the new unsigned order, the Supreme Court said the current application “is squarely controlled by Trump v. Wilcox.”
The stay in Wilcox reflected the Supreme Court’s “judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.”
“The same is true on the facts presented here, where the Consumer Product Safety Commission exercises executive power in a similar manner as the National Labor Relations Board,” the court said.
In her dissenting opinion, Kagan said the Supreme Court is eroding the power of Congress.
The court “once again … uses its emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as established by Congress.
“In doing so, the majority has also all but overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), a near-century-old precedent of this Court,” she wrote.
That precedent held that Congress may enact laws limiting the president’s ability to fire executive officials at independent agencies. The court held that President Franklin Roosevelt could not fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Kagan said that in the current case, the court is facilitating “the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”
Sotomayor and Jackson joined Kagan’s dissent.
Since his second term began in January, Trump has issued orders removing personnel from independent federal agencies such as the commission, whose appointees traditionally have been shielded from termination without cause. Many of the firings have been blocked by the courts, although in some cases the Supreme Court has recognized—at least on a provisional basis—his authority to order dismissals from independent federal agencies.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 23, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated July 24, 2025.