US court lets Trump remove Democrats from labor boards, for now

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) -Donald Trump can - for now - remove Democratic members from two federal labor boards, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday, handing the Republican president a victory in his efforts to bring independent federal agencies under his control.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision paused rulings by two judges who had deemed unlawful Trump's removal of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board.

The two Republican-appointed judges on the panel decided that laws passed by Congress shielding members of those boards from being removed without cause likely violate the U.S. Constitution by encroaching on presidential powers.

"The people elected the President to enforce the nation's laws, and a stay serves that purpose by allowing the people's chosen officer to control the executive branch," wrote Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee.

The decision will be in place pending the outcome of the Trump administration's appeals, which the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear in May.

Without Wilcox and Harris, the five-member NLRB and three-member Merit Systems Protection Board will not have enough members to decide cases, bringing much of the work of the agencies to a standstill.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly in a statement called the decision "another major court victory, vindicating (Trump's) power to control the executive branch."

Harris in a statement provided by her lawyer said: "I respectfully disagree with this decision and will be filing papers very soon that ask the full Court of Appeals to review it."

The merit board and lawyers for Wilcox did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An NLRB spokesman declined to comment.

The NLRB hears cases in which private-sector employers and labor unions are accused of illegal labor practices.

The merit board hears appeals by federal employees when they are fired or otherwise disciplined. The board has been inundated with new cases as a result of Trump's ongoing purge of the federal workforce. More than 8,400 appeals have been filed with the board since Trump returned to office in January, which is roughly the number the agency typically receives in two years.

LEGAL LIMBO

D.C. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, who dissented on Friday, said that hundreds of those pending cases will languish as a result of the court's decision. Millett said her colleagues had rewritten U.S. Supreme Court precedent that upheld protections for members of independent federal agencies from removal.

"I cannot join a decision that uses a hurried and preliminary first-look ruling by this court to announce a revolution in the law ... and to trap in legal limbo millions of employees and employers," wrote Millett, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

The panel also included Circuit Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of Republican former President George H.W. Bush.

Like several other agencies, both boards were set up by Congress to be independent from the president in order to maintain impartiality when they decide individual cases. Congress passed laws giving job protections to members of these boards, allowing them to be fired by a president only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office" and, in the case of the merit board, also for inefficiency.

Trump fired Wilcox and Harris soon after he took office in January, the first time a president had acted to remove members of either board. Harris and Wilcox filed lawsuits separately accusing Trump of violating the statutory job protections in firing them.

The Trump administration acknowledged violating the laws, but said the protections from removal for members of the two boards ran afoul of the powers given to the president under the Constitution.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Will Dunham)