The U.S. Supreme Court will convene in Washington, DC on June 11, 2026.
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The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by Democratic-appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board challenging the legality of President Donald Trump’s firing of her.
The justices rejected former NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that the Republican president’s firing of her in January 2025 was a valid exercise of executive power.
The court’s action follows a June ruling upholding President Trump’s firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.
The decision overturned the court’s 1935 precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Bailiff, which recognized Congress’s power to protect the leaders of certain regulatory agencies from arbitrary removal by the president. Slaughter’s decision ended a decades-long effort by conservatives to tighten the president’s grip on the main instruments of government power.
President Trump’s move to expel Wilcox from the NLRB was part of a reorganization and downsizing of the U.S. government that included firing thousands of workers, dismantling federal agencies, filling key jobs with allies, and purging career bureaucrats.
Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the agency’s board, was appointed to a second five-year term in 2023 by former Democratic President Joe Biden. President Trump moved to fire her about a week into his second presidential term, prompting a lawsuit from Wilcox. Slaughter was also nominated by Biden.
The legal battle over Trump’s firing of Wilcox and other officials is a key test of his efforts to keep federal agencies independent of and under presidential control as intended by Congress.
In March 2025, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell upheld a federal law protecting NLRB employees from being fired without cause, rejecting President Trump’s argument that the Congress-passed law infringed on the powers given to the president under the U.S. Constitution.
That ruling was overturned in December 2025 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision, and Wilcox appealed to the Supreme Court.
