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Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Fire Agencies’ Leaders
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let it remove the leaders of two independent agencies while their challenges to their dismissals move forward in court.
In addition to asking the justices to pause an appeals court ruling requiring the officials’ reinstatements, the administration asked the court to grant review of the cases and schedule arguments at a special session of the court in May, with a decision to follow by July.
“We acknowledge the concerns surrounding litigating and deciding the important questions raised by these cases on such a short timeline,” wrote D. John Sauer, the solicitor general.
But he said the alternative was unacceptable, as it would allow the two agencies, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board, to be overseen by officials hostile to the administration’s goals.
“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” Mr. Sauer wrote.
If the Supreme Court does not act, he wrote, “the president might be forced to continue entrusting executive power to fired officers for more than a quarter of his four-year term.”
The emergency application was the latest in a series of requests asking the Supreme Court to step in after federal judges blocked the administration’s initiatives on personnel, spending, immigration and citizenship. The court’s rulings on such requests to date have been tentative and technical.
The administration’s emergency application seeks a more categorical ruling, taking aim at a foundational 90-year-old legal precedent that said Congress can limit the president’s power to fire the heads of agencies and so shield them from politics.
Some conservative justices have said they would overrule the precedent, arguing that it unconstitutionally infringed the power of the president to lead the executive branch. That could significantly expand President Trump’s ability to fire the leaders of agencies without cause despite laws requiring a good reason for the terminations.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the precedent on Monday, ruling by a 7-to-4 vote that the administration must reinstate Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne A. Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board. Both women had been appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Weakening the power of the two boards is part of President Trump’s campaign to reshape the government and the workplace. The Merit Systems Protection Board reviews federal employment disputes, while the National Labor Relations Board safeguards the rights of private sector workers.
Mr. Trump fired the two officials in February. Though federal laws required him to cite a cause, he gave no reasons.
In Monday’s appeals court ruling, which was unsigned, the majority wrote that a 1935 Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, barred the firings.
That case concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired a commissioner, William Humphrey. The only reason he gave was that Mr. Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals.
Mr. Humphrey died a few months later, and his estate sued to recover the pay he would have received in that time. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the firing had been unlawful and that the statute at issue was constitutional.
In 2020, the Supreme Court seemed to lay the groundwork for overruling that precedent in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“In our constitutional system,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, “the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
But the chief justice drew distinctions between agencies led by a single director, like the consumer bureau, and bodies with multiple members, like the two boards. Several justices said they did not think the differences were meaningful.
The general reasoning in the chief justice’s opinion left Humphrey’s Executor on life support. Two members of the court — Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — would have pulled the plug right away.
“The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people,” Justice Thomas wrote.
He added: “With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”
The appeals court’s majority said on Monday that it was required to follow the 1935 precedent. If it is to be overruled, the majority said, the Supreme Court must do so.
new video loaded: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart, Jon Miller and Whitney Shefte
May 8, 2026
An image recorded on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows the shadows of astronauts, along with a highlighted area above the horizon showing “unidentified phenomena,” according to the Defense Department.
NASA/via Defense Department
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NASA/via Defense Department
Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers; recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects floating in mid-air. Those and other reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs — the military’s term for UFOs — are described in a trove of documents released by the Department of Defense on Friday.
In all, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena.
President Trump said via Truth Social that with the documents and other records available to the public, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/info, which will house additional files as they’re released on a rolling basis.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Defense Department posting on Facebook as it made the files public.
Friday’s action “is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said.
One document cites unusual phenomena arising during the debriefing of the Apollo 11 technical crew in July of 1969, attributing three observations to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from that lunar mission: “one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser.”
One of the oldest files dates from November 1948. The report from the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence is marked Top Secret, and it notes recurring instances of unidentified objects spotted in the skies over Europe.
“They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded,” the report states, “and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.”
The report goes on to say that U.S. officers consulted their peers in Sweden’s intelligence service about the objects, and they were told, “these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth.”
That document is seemingly free of redactions. But many details in a more recent entry are obscured, as it relays the account of a woman with deep experience with U.S. military aircraft and drones who reported an inexplicable sighting in September of 2023, in an area where airspace had been closed for testing purposes.
Materials related to that incident include a composite sketch of an ovaloid metallic object floating above a treeline, with a bright light at one end of the object.
“They watched the object for five to ten seconds and then the object just disappeared,” the report states.
Several people in at least two cars corroborated the sighting, according to the report. It states that the unidentified woman who spoke to the FBI ” would not have reported the object if she had seen it by herself.”
And hinting at the stigma that is seen as a prevalent challenge to collecting and discussing such eyewitness accounts, the report states, “Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”
Some records include venerable witnesses — such as a well-known case in 1955, when a group led by then-Sen. Richard Russell, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time, reported that they saw two strange objects from the window of a train in the former Soviet Union. The group, which included U.S. Army Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway, reported seeing what looked to be “flying disc aircraft.”
The U.S. Air Attache who prepared the report describes the witnesses as “excellent sources.”
That 1955 sighting was described in records previously released by the CIA. But that report, based on a cable received from the U.S. Air Force, seems to have been partially redacted.
The report of the unidentified object isn’t the only bit of intelligence that the American visitors brought back: the folder also includes descriptions and a diagram of a jet bomber, and accounts of a railroad switching system designed to resolve the differing widths of Russian and Czech train tracks.
A coalition of voters and Democratic candidates sued Tennessee officials in federal court late Thursday over its new congressional map, arguing that it was unconstitutional to implement new district lines this close to the state’s August primary.
It was the latest twist in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling last week on the Voting Rights Act that declared congressional districts in Louisiana to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling set off a frenetic scramble in Tennessee and several other Republican-led states to redraw their districts for partisan advantage on the assumption that they are no longer required to preserve Black majority districts.
The Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly muscled through a new congressional map on Thursday that carves up the majority-Black city of Memphis, home to the state’s lone Democratic-held seat.
The lawsuit and its outcome took on heightened stakes after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved map that created four Democratic-leaning districts in the state. If Tennessee’s map holds — and if other Southern states approve new maps that dilute majority-Black seats held by Democrats — Republicans will have established a structural advantage across multiple districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“Changing the rules midstream will create chaos for voters and throw communities into upheaval,” Rachel Campbell, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, which is also part of the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We will fight these racially gerrymandered maps tooth and nail because the future of democracy in Tennessee, across the South, and throughout this nation depends on it.”
The lawsuit centers on the constitutional right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it argues that both the voters’ and candidates’ constitutional rights were harmed by changes to the congressional map that undermined months of campaigning and voter education based on the old map.
The lawsuit also references a legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle. That principle, stemming from a contested 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez, discourages changes to voting rules and procedures close to elections.
The lawsuit was filed overnight by a cluster of voters, as well as four Democratic candidates: Representative Steve Cohen of Memphis, whose district was divided up among three new Republican-leaning districts; State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who had challenged Mr. Cohen for the Memphis seat; Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, a lead challenger to Representative Andy Ogles in what was once a solely Middle Tennessee seat; and Chaney Mosely, a candidate for a Nashville-area seat.
A second lawsuit is already underway in state court, filed Thursday afternoon by the NAACP Tennessee State Conference.
Spokeswomen for Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, and Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit also names Tre Hargett, the secretary of state, and Mark Goins, the Tennessee coordinator of elections, in their official positions. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
In their brief filed before the district court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the candidates and voters argue that the sudden shift of the congressional districts just months before the primary “will wreak chaos on the electorate, will cause significant voter confusion” and will affect election officials’ ability to administer the election. They asked the court to stop the implementation of the map before the 2026 election.
Tennessee was the first state to draft and approve a map after the Supreme Court’s ruling raised the bar for challenging district lines under the Voting Rights Act. Within a week, Mr. Lee summoned lawmakers to Nashville for a special session, and Republican leaders had drawn and approved a new map that gives the party an advantage toward electing an entirely Republican congressional delegation.
The map carved up the Ninth Congressional District, where two-thirds of the voting-age population is Black, into thirds, most likely eliminating the state’s lone Democrat-leaning district. It also moved district lines around the Nashville area in an apparent bid to shore up Mr. Ogles.
Candidates now have until noon on May 15 to file papers with the secretary of state’s office. Those who already qualified may remain in the new district with the same number. At least one Republican, State Senator Brent Taylor, has already announced his candidacy for the new Ninth Congressional District.
All four congressional candidates on the suit warned that they would have to “to expend more resources identifying, associating with, and campaigning to voters who live in the newly-enacted district.”
They also pointed to litigation filed in February 2022 after a new map of State House and State Senate districts that year was challenged, prompting a push to delay the qualifying date from April to May. At the time, Tennessee officials argued against moving the qualifying date. The State Supreme Court agreed.
Seamus Hughes and Katherine Chui contributed research.
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