In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox said the Trump administration had invalidly removed the commissioners and that the government should provide necessary resources for them to carry out their duties.
The commission focuses on preventing injuries associated with consumer products by issuing mandatory standards, among other things. It can also conduct administrative investigations with the power to issue and enforce subpoenas.
The fired commissioners—each appointed by President Joe Biden—sued, alleging that President Donald Trump had violated federal law by removing them without cause. In response, the Justice Department said that Congress had unconstitutionally restricted the president’s ability to fire subordinates.
Similar legal battles have played out in recent months in relation to other agencies whose members were fired by Trump. Collectively, they’re prompting questions about the extent of presidential power and the role of Congress in insulating bureaucrats from removal.
Much of the debate centers around a Supreme Court decision from 1935 known as Humphrey’s Executor. In that case, the court held that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrongly fired a former member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which Congress attempted to protect in a similar way as the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The court noted that the FTC was a multi-member body that performed “quasi-judicial” or “quasi-legislative” functions rather than merely performing some kind of executive function. In his June 13 opinion, Maddox said the Consumer Product Safety Commission “resembles the 1935 FTC in both structure and function, and therefore qualifies for the Humphrey’s Executor exception” to the president’s removal power.
The administration has pointed to another, much more recent Supreme Court decision known as Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the bureau’s single director was protected in a way that violated the Constitution. In contrast to the FTC’s multi-member structure, the CFPB had a single director who exercised more executive power, the court said in 2020.
The Justice Department maintained in a court filing that Article II of the Constitution, which outlines the president’s authority, only allowed two narrow exceptions to the president’s ability to remove officials like the commissioners. One of those came through Humphrey’s Executor, the Justice Department said, but that didn’t apply to the commissioners who had sued.
Among other things, it said that the commission “exercises significant executive power” and was different than the 1935 FTC. More specifically, it pointed to the commission’s “broad rulemaking authority,” which included banning certain consumer products as hazardous.
“Indeed, the vast scope of the CPSC’s regulatory authority—which includes the authority to promulgate consumer product safety standards implicating tens of thousands of consumer products confirms that the Commission exercises significant executive power,” the Justice Department said.
While the Supreme Court hasn’t issued a final ruling on Trump’s removals of high-level officials, the department pointed to how the Supreme Court had temporarily allowed Trump to remove members of two other agencies. Those cases involved the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. A Supreme Court order on May 22 stayed lower court rulings against Trump in those cases while the appeals process played out.
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