CRS Legal Sidebar – Supreme Court Grants Emergency Motion on President’s Removal Power, June 4, 2025: “On May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court granted the executive branch’s motion to stay lower court orders reinstating officials at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) who enjoy statutory removal protections. Over the opening months of his second Administration, President Donald Trump has actively dismissed agency leaders across the federal government. Some of these removals have raised significant controversy, most notably the dismissal of executive branch officials with statutory removal protections who were in the midst of an unfinished fixed term on an independent regulatory commission. President Trump recently dismissed members of the NLRB, MSPB, Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), multimember entities where federal law provides that they can be removed by the President only for cause. In dismissing these officials, the President did not assert that the statutory criteria for removal had been met. Instead, the Administration has largely taken the position that statutory for-cause restrictions that limit the President’s authority to remove agency leaders unconstitutionally infringe on the President’s authority to remove executive officials. The Administration asserts, therefore, that the President may remove these officials at will…This case and other pending lawsuits involving the FLRA and FTC remain in early stages, but they present constitutional issues that could fundamentally alter Congress’s long-standing authority to use its legislative powers to ensure that certain functions are carried out by officials with some independence or autonomy from presidential and partisan influences. This Sidebar describes the governing constitutional principles and summarizes the D.C. Circuit’s decision in the NLRB and MSPB removal case…”

The Supreme Court has interpreted Article II of the U.S. Constitution to provide the President with “general administrative control” of the executive branch. This principle, which has implicit textual roots, is founded in the proposition that the Constitution—by vesting “the executive Power” solely in the President and making it his personal responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”—affords the President both the power and the duty to supervise and control those who exercise executive power. As a practical matter, the President exerts his influence in many ways, but ultimately, his control over subordinates is enforced by either removing, or threatening to remove, executive officials who may not act “in accordance with the policies that the people presumably elected the President to promote.”