Chief Justice John Roberts ruled Wednesday that President Donald Trump could remove Democratic appointees from two federal agencies, Newsmax reported. The high court will have to decide whether Trump has the power to unilaterally dismiss them. 

A lower court had already decided that Trump could not dismiss Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris and National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox. The pair have been fired and reinstated several times over based on court rulings about Trump's ability to make these moves.

This latest stay from Roberts will allow the president's dismissal to stand until the matter has been litigated. However, that fact does not indicate whether the Supreme Court will side with Trump.

🚨 JUST IN: CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS allows Trump to fire these two federal agency heads after a court reinstated them.

Cathy A. Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. pic.twitter.com/YOOg0cCLIZ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 9, 2025

At Odds

According to Fox News, Trump dismissed Democrat holdovers Harris and Wilcox, but their jobs were protected under federal law that says they must not be dismissed without cause. On Monday, a 7-4 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated them.

The justices said the precedent set in the Supreme Court's 1935 Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener v. United States decision supported the ruling. As officials serving on "multimember adjudicatory boards," their positions were secure even against the president's wishes.

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly told the courts of appeals to follow extant Supreme Court precedent unless and until that Court itself changes it or overturns it," the justices asserted in their opinion. Trump has been stopped several times on other issues by what he calls "activist judges."

The justices overseeing the separate cases were loathe to give such power to the president to dismiss Harris and Wilcox. The judge in Harris' case, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, warned that to allow the president to "displace independent agency heads from their positions for the length of litigation such as this, those officials’ independence would shatter."

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who oversaw the Wilcox case, similarly warned against granting the president the ability to wield such control. "A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution," Howell wrote in her opinion.

Power Struggle

The lower courts feel that the precedent is airtight. However, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris of the Justice Department sent a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is a ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to rethink this standard.

Harris contended "that certain for-cause removal provisions" are unconstitutional when applied to all agency members, including those represented by the plaintiffs. She stressed that the Department of Justice would "no longer defend their constitutionality."

Harris said the Humphrey's Executor decision "prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President's behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions." Durbin disagreed with this assessment, but many conservative legal scholars believe in the power of the executive branch through Myers.

Trump has been going to battle with judges who have attempted to stop his agenda. However, the president's power over personnel decisions shouldn't be challenged even if he's politically at odds with the judges making the decision.