Washington — A federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday that President Trump’s firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board was unlawful and said she must be allowed to continue in her role.
In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, said that the Constitution and past cases make clear that Congress can limit the president’s removal power. She ruled that the president’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox from the NLRB violated federal law that allows for a board member to be removed only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” and declared her termination void.
“Under our constitutional system, such checks, by design, guard against executive overreach and the risk such overreach would pose of autocracy,” Howell wrote in a 36-page decision. “An American president is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here.”
Howell, appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote that Mr. Trump “seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme.”
Wilcox was nominated to the NLRB by former President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term in September 2023. She was designated chair of the board in December 2024.
But soon after returning to a second term in the White House, Mr. Trump replaced Wilcox as chair and fired her from her position on the board in late January. While the National Labor Relations Act requires the president to remove a member “upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” the email sent to Wilcox on behalf of the president stated that she and another board member have not “been operating in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration.”
Wilcox told CBS News last month that she was “stunned” when she received a letter from the White House firing her.
“I handled cases where workers were fired and retaliated against for their conduct, but I never imagined that I would be the person being fired for doing my job,” Wilcox, 71, said. She swiftly challenged her firing in federal court.
In her decision, the judge noted that in the 90 years since the NLRB was founded, the president has never removed a member of its board.
“His attempt to do so here is blatantly illegal, and his constitutional arguments to excuse this illegal act are contrary to Supreme Court precedent and over a century of practice,” she said.
The court found that a Supreme Court decision from 1935 binds the outcome of Wilcox’s case. That case carved out an exception to the president’s power to remove executive officers. The Supreme Court found that Congress could impose for-cause removal protections for multi-member commissions of experts that are balanced along partisan lines and do not exercise any executive power.
“The 150-year history and tradition of multimember boards or commissions and 90-year precedent from the Supreme Court approving of removal protections for their officers dictates the same outcome for the NLRB here,” Howell wrote.
She added that “nothing in the Constitution or the historical development of the removal power has suggested the president’s removal power is absolute.”
“The president does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law,” the judge found.
Howell criticized Mr. Trump for portraying himself as a king — pointing to a social media post from the White House last month that featured an illustration of the president wearing a crown, along with the headline “long live the king” — and said that he misunderstands the role of Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the scope of the president’s powers.
“At issue in this case, is the president’s insistence that he has authority to fire whomever he wants within the Executive branch, overriding any congressionally mandated law in his way,” she wrote. “Luckily, the Framers, anticipating such a power grab, vested in Article III, not Article II, the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on presidential authority. The president’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong.”
The decision from Howell sets the case on a path to the Supreme Court and could lead it to overturn the 1935 decision in the case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Sarah Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote in a letter to Congress last month that the Trump administration believes that certain for-cause removal restrictions for multi-member commissions are unconstitutional and would urge the Supreme Court to overturn its precedent.
The high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has in recent years chipped away at that 90-year-old ruling and reasserted the president’s power to remove executive branch officers at will. Most notably in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s structure of a single leader removable only for inefficiency, neglect or malfeasance was unconstitutional.
Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have already indicated that they believe the Supreme Court should reverse Humphrey’s Executor.
“The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion to its 2020 decision on the CFPB, which was joined by Gorsuch.
Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court, said that in a future case, he “would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”
