The Trump administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court to permit him to fire the head of the Office of Special Counsel.
A lower court previously ordered Hampton Dellinger to be reinstated.
Dellinger filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration last week, claiming he was “entitled to continue to serve as Special Counsel for the remainder of his five-year term and may be removed by the President ‘only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.’”
“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the President to retain an agency head whom the President believes should not be entrusted with executive power and to prevent the President from relying on his preferred replacement,” Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote. “Yet the district court remarkably found no irreparable harm to the President if he is judicially barred from exercising exclusive and preclusive powers of the Presidency for at least 16 days, and perhaps for a month.”
“The United States now seeks this Court’s intervention because these judicial rulings irreparably harm the Presidency by curtailing the President’s ability to manage the Executive Branch in the earliest days of his Administration,” the filing read.
According to the application, the U.S. Constitution “empowers the President to remove, at will, the single head of an agency, such as the Special Counsel.”
Several other inspectors general fired by President Donald Trump have sued his administration, demanding to be reinstated. The plaintiffs alleged in the lawsuit that their firings violated federal laws. One of the laws requires a president to give Congress a 30-day notice before removing the inspector general.
“In this action, the duly appointed Inspectors General of eight major U.S. agencies— the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, State, Agriculture, Education, and Labor, and the Small Business Administration—seek redress for their unlawful and unjustified purported termination by President Donald Trump and their respective agency heads,” the lawsuit says. “The purported firings violated unambiguous federal statutes—each enacted by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed into law by the President—to protect Inspectors General from precisely this sort of interference with the discharge of their critical, non-partisan oversight duties.”
