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President Donald Trump overstepped his authority when he fired MSPB Chairwoman Cathy Harris, a federal judge ruled.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unlawfully fired the chairwoman of a regulatory board charged with overseeing employment complaints from federal workers and whistleblowers, a judge ruled Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras granted a preliminary injunction restoring Cathy Harris to her post as chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board and barring the Trump administration from removing her without cause or obstructing her ability to do her job.
Harris was nominated to her position by former President Joe Biden in May 2022 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate a month later to a seven-year term.
The MSPB was created by Congress in 1978 to hear complaints from whistleblowers and federal workers who say they’ve been arbitrarily punished or suffered due to favoritism. Under federal law, the president can only remove an MSPB member before the expiration of their term for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Harris sued last month, saying the one-line email informing her of her termination cited no such reason and, as such, she should remain in her post. On Tuesday, Contreras agreed.
“Because the President did not indicate that he sought to remove Harris for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, his attempt to terminate her was unlawful and exceeded the scope of his authority,” he wrote.
Harris is among a growing list of officials challenging their terminations by Trump. Over the weekend, another federal judge in D.C. granted a similar injunction restoring U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger to his job at the head of the government watchdog agency. A judge was set to hear arguments in a third lawsuit on Wednesday from Gwynne Wilcox, who argues she, like Harris and Dellinger, was wrongfully terminated from her job as chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The Trump administration has also been sued by eight inspectors general Trump fired en masse during his first week in office.
Last month, the Special Counsel’s Office referred to the MSPB the cases of six workers who were fired during the Trump administration’s mass terminations of probationary employees, saying they appeared contrary to a “reasonable reading of the law.” The MSPB ordered all six terminations paused last week while it hears their complaint.
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