The Supreme Court on Monday will consider whether President Trump can fire independent government officials despite laws meant to protect them from politics, a major test for the justices to determine how far to expand presidential power.
The justices are being asked to overturn a landmark decision from 1935, which said that Congress could put limits on the president’s authority to remove some executive branch officials.
In recent rulings, the court’s conservative majority signaled that it was receptive to Mr. Trump’s claims that a president should not be forced to delegate authority to agency heads at odds with his agenda.
A decision in the president’s favor would call into question the constitutionality of job protections extended to more than two dozen other agencies Congress has charged with protecting consumers, workers and the environment — and potentially upend the fundamental structure of the modern government.
Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has fired government watchdogs, leaders of independent agencies and rank-and-file federal workers, drawing multiple legal challenges.
The Supreme Court has generally allowed the firings to take effect through temporary emergency orders. Monday’s case, involving the Federal Trade Commission, presents the first opportunity for the court to issue a conclusive ruling on the underlying legal questions of Mr. Trump’s firings.
Next month, the justices will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. The justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank may be uniquely insulated from presidential interference because of its history.
At issue on Monday is Mr. Trump’s firing in March of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the F.T.C. The president said he was removing her because she did not align with his agenda, despite a law that says the president can remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Ms. Slaughter promptly sued.
Congress intentionally created such bipartisan commissions — made up of experts who could not be fired by the president without cause — to ensure that policy decisions would be made free from politics.
The F.T.C., created in 1914, protects consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power. It is led by five commissioners who serve staggered seven-year terms; no more than three can be members of the same party.
The F.T.C. has been led by only Republicans since March, after Mr. Trump fired a second Democrat, Alvaro Bedoya. After initially challenging his firing, Mr. Bedoya resigned, citing financial pressures.
A district court judge said in July that Ms. Slaughter’s firing was illegal, and in early September, a divided court panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated her.
That court said that a commissioner could not be fired without the required grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” The panel pointed to the job protections upheld by the 1935 decision that also involved a fired F.T.C. commissioner.
In that decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the court unanimously upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember boards. The justices in that case said President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not remove a member of the F.T.C. merely because of political differences.
But in the last 15 years, the court has repeatedly narrowed that decision to give the president more control over executive officials.
“Since 1789, the Constitution has been understood to empower the president to keep these officers accountable — by removing them from office, if necessary,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2010.
More recently, the court found that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire its single director without cause. The court allowed the job protections to remain for multimember bodies like the F.T.C.
But in its emergency orders issued this year, the conservative majority has let the president temporarily remove leaders of agencies led by such multimember boards, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
As a result, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, suggested in court filings that the precedent at issue was already a “dead letter” that should be overruled. Such tenure protections, he told the court in filings, unconstitutionally infringe on the president’s power to run the executive branch.
In response, Ms. Slaughter’s lawyers have told the court that getting rid of the precedent decades later would “profoundly destabilize institutions that are now inextricably intertwined with the fabric of American governance.”
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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