U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump could not remove without cause Cathy Harris from her position at the Merit Systems Protection Board before her term expires in three years, saying the agency’s “mission and purpose require independence.”
The judge had issued a temporary restraining order on February 18 that required Harris to be reinstated as the board's chair while he considered her claims that Trump had illegally fired her earlier that month.
But Contreras, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said the statutory protections the board's members enjoy from being removed without cause were constitutional under a 90-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that has long limited a president's ability to fire certain agency heads.
The Trump administration moved swiftly to appeal the ruling, which the Justice Department in court papers described as an “extraordinary intrusion into the president’s authority.”
“All I want to do is do the job the United States Congress asked me to do,“ she said.
The merit board has proved to be a potential roadblock in the Trump administration's efforts to carry out mass firings of probationary workers, after having halted the firing of six such employees at the request of a watchdog agency whose leader Trump has also sought to fire, Hampton Dellinger of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
More than 4,800 workers have filed complaints with the board since Trump took office, a massive surge for an agency with fewer than 300 employees. The board had received between 70 and 110 complaints each week in the months before Trump took office.
Harris was appointed to the merit board in 2022 by Trump's Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, to serve a seven-year term. Trump fired her on February 10 and named Henry Kerner, a Republican, as acting chair of the board.
Trump's removal of Harris had threatened to result in the board losing quorum and being unable to decide cases, as the term of its remaining Democrat, Raymond Limon, expired on Friday. (Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Mike Scarcella in Washington; Additional reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
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