President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court on July 14 to lift a lower court order blocking his firing of three Biden appointees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
The new legal filing is part of the president’s effort to remove personnel from independent federal agencies whose appointees traditionally have been shielded from termination without cause.
The supplementary brief in Trump v. Boyle comes after Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency application on behalf of the president on July 2 seeking to allow the terminations.
In May, Trump removed three members of the CPSC: Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr., all of whom had been appointed by President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox of Maryland blocked the firings, relying on a statute that he said insulates CPSC 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.
The commission members “never ceased to lawfully occupy their offices,” Circuit Judge James Wynn said.
“Permitting their unlawful removal would … deprive the public of the Commission’s full expertise and oversight.”
In the new brief, the government referenced the Supreme Court’s May 22 ruling in Trump v. Wilcox that allowed the president to fire members of independent labor boards.
In that case, the nation’s highest 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 the July 14 brief that in this case, lower courts have refused to follow the Trump v. Wilcox precedent allowing firings of members of the MSPB and NLRB.
“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,” Sauer said.
An advisory opinion is a court ruling that offers guidance on a legal issue but does not resolve a specific case.
In the application the government filed on July 2, 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.
On July 11, the three commission members urged the Supreme Court not to grant the government’s application.
The president fired the members without providing a reason and in doing so, violated a federal law that prevents him “from terminating CPSC Commissioners absent neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” their brief said.
Malfeasance in this context means wrongdoing committed by a public official.
The brief argued that the government is asking the Supreme Court to prevent the members “from serving in the roles that the district court held they are entitled to occupy and that they have in fact been occupying for the last month.”
The district court found that according to the reasoning in the ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the statute preventing the CPSC members’ removal without cause was constitutional, so the members could not be dismissed, the brief said.
Although the government has argued that allowing the members to remain in their posts has created “chaos” at the commission, the brief stated, the members are simply performing their duties, including revoking actions the commission “unlawfully took” when it lacked a quorum, or the legally required minimum number of members needed to transact business.
The government’s emergency application is currently pending before Chief Justice John Roberts.
The Supreme Court may rule on the application at any time.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 14, 2025, in The Epoch Times.