The Supreme Court on Monday, October 19, declined to hear Gwynne Wilcox's challenge to President Donald Trump's decision to fire her from the National Labor Relations Board. The order in Wilcox v. Trump leaves in place an appeals court ruling that the law protecting her job was unconstitutional, SCOTUSblog reported.
The denial closes one of the early legal fights over Trump's second term push to control independent agencies. It also shows how much the ground has shifted since she was removed.
How the case got here
Trump moved to fire Wilcox shortly after his second inauguration. The federal law governing the board allowed a member to be removed only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office," and the president did not claim either one.
Lower courts first ordered her reinstated. In May 2025, the Supreme Court paused those orders and allowed her removal to take effect while the case continued. The unsigned order said the government faced a greater risk of harm from letting a removed officer keep exercising executive power than a wrongly removed officer faced from being kept off the job, according to SCOTUSblog's account of the order.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She called the order "nothing short of extraordinary" and wrote that it "allows the President to overrule Humphrey's by fiat, again pending our eventual review."
In December 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against Wilcox on the merits. Judge Gregory Katsas, writing for the majority, held that the job protection for board members violates the separation of powers. Wilcox asked the Supreme Court to step in this June.
The rulings that changed the question
Humphrey's Executor, the 1935 decision Kagan referred to, upheld limits on the president's power to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission. For about 90 years it was the main legal support for independent agencies whose leaders could not be removed at will.
This summer, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ruled that the president may remove the leaders of nearly all independent federal agencies on his own. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the FTC now exercises substantial executive power and must be "controlled by the Chief Executive." He added, "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it," as law professor Rodger Citron recounted in a SCOTUSblog column.
On the same day, in Trump v. Cook, Roberts wrote that the legal limit on removing a Federal Reserve governor remains valid, resting that exception on "history and tradition." Any "change in that scheme must come from Congress, not the courts," he wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas challenged that historical account.
What it means now
With Slaughter on the books, Wilcox's argument that the NLRB statute protected her had little room left. The Court's refusal to hear her case does not add a new rule. It leaves her removal in place, along with the D.C. Circuit's holding that board members can be removed at will.
The practical effect reaches beyond one official. The NLRB decides disputes between unions and employers, and its members can now be replaced whenever the White House wants new leadership. The Slaughter majority reasoned that agencies wielding executive power must answer to the president. Critics, including the dissenting justices in 2025, warned that it strips away a long standing check.
The fight over how far presidential power runs is not limited to agencies. We looked at the same question in the war powers context in who decides when America goes to war. It is the kind of case the Two Taps legal panel takes apart on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
