The court’s conservative majority suggested it would overturn a unanimous 90-year-old decision that has limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members, or leave it with only its shell intact.
Chief Justice John Roberts referred to the decision known as Humphrey's Executor as “a dry husk.”
Liberal justices warned that the decision sought by the administration would concentrate vast power in the president's hands, robbing the agencies of expertise.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the president would be able to “fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs and replace them with loyalists and people who don't know anything.”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer defended Trump's decision to fire Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter without cause and called on the court to jettison Humphrey's Executor.
Sauer said the decision “hasn't withstood the test of time” and had enabled a “headless fourth branch” of government, the administrative state that conservatives and business interests have been taking aim at for decades.
The six conservative justices, including three appointed by Trump in his first term, already have signaled strong support for the administration's position, over the liberals' objection, by allowing Slaughter and the board members of other agencies to be removed from their jobs even as their legal challenges continue.
Members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission also have been fired by Trump.
