SCOTUS turns away Trump-fired board member who said she was entitled to judge-like 'protections' for 'unpopular decisions'

Left: Gwynne A. Wilcox (National Labor Relations Board). Right: President Donald Trump gives remarks during an event celebrating the 2024 Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025 (Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images).

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a fired National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member's last-ditch bid to save her job, handing a win to the DOJ and President Donald Trump's purge of former President Joe Biden's appointees.

After the high court's June decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the justices recognized Trump's broad authority to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Gwynne Wilcox filed a petition for a writ of certiorari opposing a causeless firing.

Claiming that she was entitled to Article III judge-like "protections" from being summarily ousted for "unpopular decisions," Wilcox also in June asserted that the NLRB's "five-member Board is structured like an independent court in both form and function, with members acting as a panel of appellate judges, issuing mostly unanimous decisions by applying federal labor law to the record in the cases that come before it."

"In disregard of the NLRB's removal protections, President Trump removed petitioner Gwynne A. Wilcox from her role as a member of the Board without notice, a hearing, or cause," the petition said, noting Wilcox's "resulting case against the President has already come before this Court twice before."

This time, Wilcox asserted that the justices had to take up the case because a post-Slaughter world left the NLRB "under a cloud of constitutional uncertainty," which the petition called an "untenable" situation.

"Every year, the Board decides hundreds of disputes brought by employers, employees, and unions. To leave its status under Slaughter unresolved would cast those decisions into doubt, depriving the agency's stakeholders, and the agency itself, of the certainty they urgently need," court documents said.

For the DOJ and U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, "Slaughter control[led] this case" and meant that Trump can remove NLRB members "at will" because the agency wields "considerable executive power," like the FTC.

"While that alone establishes that the President must be able to remove NLRB members at will, the NLRB also has 'the power to promulgate substantive rules that carry the force of law,'" the DOJ's opposing brief said, again citing the Slaughter case. "The power to issue such rules 'is executive through and through.'"

On Monday, the justices denied Wilcox's petition, without elaborating.