In a late-stage legal power play, the U.S. Supreme Court has greenlit President Donald Trump’s abrupt removal of three Democratic commissioners from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), further cementing his control over agencies once thought to be insulated from presidential interference.
With a quiet unsigned order, the court swept aside a federal judge’s block on the firings, signaling its agreement with the Trump administration’s argument: that the president holds sweeping constitutional authority to dismiss executive officials—even those Congress had intended to protect from political whiplash.
The ruling nullifies an earlier decision from a Maryland court that had rebuked Trump’s May firings of Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr., all holdovers from the Biden administration. Their staggered terms were supposed to last well into the next few years—until 2025, 2027, and 2028 respectively—but Trump’s White House cut them short with a few strokes of the pen.
This decision is the latest in a series of Supreme Court interventions backing Trump as he bulldozes through layers of bureaucratic insulation built by past Congresses. It echoes the court’s recent nods allowing Trump to purge officials from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board—actions previously restrained by statutory job protections.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in a sharp dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the court was “once again dismantling the independence of an independent agency,” all without full briefing or oral argument. She lamented what she called the creeping shift of power away from Congress and toward the executive branch, enabled through emergency rulings with minimal transparency.
“This isn’t just about removing three officials,” Kagan wrote. “It’s about removing the architecture Congress built to keep regulatory agencies balanced, bipartisan, and focused on their mission—not the president’s politics.”
At the center of the storm is the 1972-created Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal watchdog responsible for recalling dangerous goods, setting safety standards, and protecting the public from household hazards. By design, the agency was meant to resist political tides: commissioners were only to be removed for clear misconduct or dereliction of duty—not because a new president dislikes their affiliation.
But Trump’s legal team challenged that foundational principle, asserting that statutory protections cannot override the president’s constitutional powers over executive personnel. That argument gained traction, with the court indicating that the CPSC, like the NLRB, wields “considerable executive power” and thus falls under the president’s hire-and-fire authority.
A Biden-appointed judge had previously leaned on a bedrock 1935 precedent—*Humphrey’s Executor v. United States*—to shield the commissioners, defending the idea that some agencies must operate free of presidential whim. But the Supreme Court’s decision now casts a shadow over that once-solid ruling, potentially teeing up its full erosion.
Legal counsel for the ousted commissioners vowed not to retreat. “This intervention strips the commission of diverse voices and opens the door to unchecked executive control,” said attorney Nicolas Sansone. “We will continue to fight.”
For now, though, the CPSC has been reshaped in Trump’s image—and the high court has shown it won’t stand in the way.
