Are Independent Fed Agencies President?

Supreme Court is likely to soon decide where the buck stops for enforcing antitrust or labor law, let alone any federal agency action. With the President & his Article II power to run executive branch or “independent” body created by Congress & run by bureaucrats?

In its op ed “Trump, the NLRB & Humphrey’s Executor,” the WSJ again raises the critical legal question, “Does the Supreme Court believe in ‘independent’ federal agencies?” They remind that the entire concept started during Woodrow Wilson’s Administration who favored a new bureaucracy approach & urged Congress to essentially pass laws to make this happen whenever it saw fit. Over the years, the concept has been expanded through a proverbial “thousand cuts & wounds,” so that we now not only have the NLRB, but SEC, FCC, FTC, CFPF, FERC and so on … all of which pretty much act as executive fiefdoms that insist their “special expertise” trumps (no pun intended) White House directives.

The flashpoint, the editors note, was President Trump’s firing of Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel. But, there are many others in the pipeline as No. 47 tries to streamline and/or right size the federal bureaucracy. In a separate dispute for example, the president is being sued for terminating Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board aka NLRB. Wilcox says her firing was without cause & is a “blatant violation” of a Congressional statute as well as a 1935 precedent set in the High Court’s Humphrey’s Executor decision. Yet, in a recent letter to the US Senate, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris says Justice “has concluded that those tenure protections are unconstitutional.” So? So, folks, hold on to your butts until the current Justices make the call.

Davd Soul