<p style="font-weight: 400;">After a federal district court blocked President Donald Trump from firing the head of a government ethics watchdog agency and the US Circuit Court of Appeals <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/16/politics/federal-court-trump-firing-power-dellinger/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">refused</a> — in a 2-1 decision — to overrule the lower court, the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden to head the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by Congress on January 1, 1979, to protect federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices (PPPs), especially reprisal for “whistleblowing.” Dellinger was confirmed by the Democratic Senate for a five-year term in 2024; he sued after Trump fired him.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">The two judges who refused to overrule the lower court’s decision, J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan, were Biden nominees; the judge contending against them, Gregory Katsas, was nominated by Trump.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“This case involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief,” acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris wrote in the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25536870-bessent-v-dellinger-vacatur-application/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">appeal</a>. “As this Court observed just last Term, &#8216;Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority”—including “the President’s ‘unrestricted power of removal’ with respect to ‘executive officers of the United States whom [the President] has appointed.’”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“In the last five years, this Court has twice held that restrictions on the President’s authority to remove principal officers who serve as the sole heads of executive agencies violate Article II—in those cases, the single heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency,” she continued. “Whatever the agency, for the President to discharge his constitutional duty to supervise those who exercise executive power on his behalf, the President can ‘remove the head of an agency with a single top officer’ at will. On that basis, President Biden in 2021 fired the single head of the Social Security Administration without cause. Thus, when President Trump, on February 7, 2025, removed respondent Hampton Dellinger as the single head of the Office of Special Counsel, he engaged in an uncontroversial exercise of his Article II powers.”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the president to retain an agency head whom the president believes should not be entrusted with executive power and to prevent the president from relying on his preferred replacement,” she stated. “Yet the district court remarkably found no irreparable harm to the President if he is judicially barred from exercising exclusive and preclusive powers of the Presidency for at least 16 days, and perhaps for a month.”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">She addressed the Supreme Court directly: “ &#8230; this Court’s precedents are pellucid that Article II empowers the President to remove, at will, the single head of an agency, such as the Special Counsel. &#8230; this Court’s precedents are clear that district courts lack equitable power to reinstate principal officers. By transgressing both of those lines of precedent, the district court erred in ways that threaten the separation of powers the administration asserts in its appeal.”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“Executive power belongs to the President, not to respondent, and wresting control of that power from the President is constitutionally intolerable,” she concluded.</p>

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‘Executive Power Belongs To The President’: Trump Appeals Ruling Blocking Him From Firing Official