By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump to remove a Democratic member from a federal labor board while his administration appeals a ruling that said her firing was illegal and had reinstated her.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit paused the lower court decision pending the appeal, saying a law shielding members of the Federal Labor Relations Authority from being removed at will likely violated Trump’s broad powers to control the executive branch.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington had ruled otherwise in March and ordered the reinstatement of Susan Tsui Grundmann, who had been fired by Trump a month earlier.
The three-member FLRA, which was created by Congress to be independent from the White House, hears disputes between federal agencies and their employees’ unions and will likely play a role in reviewing Trump’s efforts to drastically overhaul the federal workforce.
The FLRA can order agencies to bargain with unions and in some cases prevent agencies from firing unionized workers.
Without Grundmann, the board has one Democratic and one Republican member, making it prone to being deadlocked.
The White House, the agency, and lawyers for Grundmann did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
All three judges on the D.C. Circuit panel were appointed by Trump during his first term.
Nearly 30% of federal employees are represented by unions, which typically gives them more legal protections than other government workers. Unions are generally required to bring legal disputes with federal agencies to the FLRA, preventing them from going to court first.
Federal judges have said they lack the ability to hear some lawsuits by unions over Trump administration policies, including mass firings, because the claims belonged at the FLRA.
Trump did not provide a reason for firing Grundmann, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, according to court filings. Grundmann in her lawsuit claims Trump violated a federal labor relations law that says FLRA members may only be removed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Sooknanan in her March ruling rejected the Trump administration’s claims that those protections were unconstitutional.
Trump has fired Democratic officials from a number of federal agencies, drawing a series of legal challenges.
A different D.C. Circuit panel is expected to rule soon on whether the removal of members of two labor boards was illegal. The decision could set important precedent on the president’s power to fire officials at a range of multi-member agencies such as the Federal Reserve and may tee up review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Alexia Garamfalvi and Aurora Ellis)
