By Mike Scarcella and Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -Three Democratic members of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, alleging their terminations were unlawful.
Commissioners Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr. filed their lawsuit in the federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. Each was appointed by former President Joe Biden to the five-member commission.
They said in their lawsuit that Republican President Donald Trump’s administration illegally terminated them without cause and with no explanation.
Commissioners of independent agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission can be removed by the president only for neglect of duty or malfeasance, the lawsuit said.
“Safety shouldn’t be partisan,” Boyle said in a statement. “The CPSC needs independent leadership that is not beholden to anyone, whether it is corporate interests or the administration.”
A White House spokesperson in a statement on Wednesday said the U.S. Constitution “gives President Trump the power to remove personnel who exercise his executive authority. The Trump Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”
The safety commission, founded in 1972, is a regulatory and enforcement agency tasked by Congress with shielding consumers from injury or death from defective or harmful products.
The commissioners’ lawsuit said a judge should declare the removals unlawful and immediately allow the three members to return to their posts. Boyle’s term was due to expire in October, Hoehn-Saric’s in 2027 and Trumka’s in 2028.
Trump has fired Democrats from several agencies that were designed to be independent from the White House, triggering lawsuits that are testing the bounds of his power to steer federal policymaking.
The laws governing some of those agencies, including the CPSC, explicitly allow members to be removed only for cause. The Trump administration has argued that those protections encroach on the president’s broad authority.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is expected to rule soon on whether laws shielding members of two federal labor boards from removal are valid.
Members of other agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where Trump removed two Democrats in January, are not explicitly protected from at-will removal. But fired members of those agencies have argued that their structure indicates that Congress intended to insulate them from political influence.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. agreed with those claims on Wednesday, ruling that Trump’s removal of two members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was illegal.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario, Aurora Ellis and Joe Bavier)
