As Americans across the nation prepared to honor our fallen heroes this Memorial Day weekend, the Supreme Court delivered a quiet yet momentous victory to President Donald Trump—a victory that strikes at the heart of the liberal administrative state and restores the true constitutional order envisioned by our Founding Fathers.
In a concise but powerful two-page order, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court ruling that had attempted to force President Trump to reinstate two unelected federal officials he had removed: Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board. Chief Justice John Roberts was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, while the Court’s liberals—Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented.
Make no mistake: this decision is about far more than two bureaucrats. It represents a critical blow to the arrogant, entrenched administrative state that has plagued Washington for decades. Progressive politicians, starting with Woodrow Wilson, have long believed that unelected “experts” should wield tremendous power over the American people—power that exists beyond the reach of elections, accountability, or constitutional checks and balances. The result has been an army of faceless bureaucrats, free to impose their will and ideology, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
This Progressive vision of government by technocrats is fundamentally incompatible with our Constitution. Article II explicitly vests executive power in the President, who has the authority to appoint—and, logically, remove—the officials who execute that power. The Supreme Court rightly recognized this truth in 1926, when Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote in Myers v. United States that removal of federal officers is inherently an executive function.
But then, in 1935, the Supreme Court went astray in Humphrey’s Executor, granting Congress the power to limit a president’s removal authority over certain “independent” agency officials. This misguided decision gave birth to today’s massive, unaccountable bureaucratic state. Yet now, in Trump v. Wilcox, the Court has signaled that Humphrey’s Executor is on life support and perhaps not long for this world.
Indeed, the Court’s recent rulings—from Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB (2010) to Seila Law v. CFPB (2020)—have steadily chipped away at the administrative state’s unconstitutional fortress. The latest order in Trump v. Wilcox goes even further, underscoring the president’s inherent, constitutional authority to remove executive officials who exercise real power. The Court declared plainly that President Trump is likely correct in asserting that both the NLRB and MSPB wield “considerable executive power,” making these officials removable at his discretion.
Justice Elena Kagan, lamenting the ruling in her dissent, inadvertently confirmed conservatives’ hopes and progressives’ fears: Humphrey’s Executor is effectively dead, or at least gravely wounded. Kagan’s frustration is understandable from a liberal perspective—after all, the administrative state has been the Left’s most effective weapon against conservative reforms for nearly a century. But the Court’s order is firmly rooted in constitutional originalism and common sense: unelected bureaucrats should never wield unchecked, autonomous power in our republic.
President Trump’s fight against Washington’s swamp isn’t merely symbolic—it’s rooted in a genuine, principled commitment to restore the constitutional balance of power envisioned by our Founders. For too long, unelected bureaucrats have defied the will of the people, undermined conservative reforms, and imposed progressive ideology by regulatory fiat. With this ruling, the Supreme Court has made it clear that such arrogance will no longer stand.
Of course, the battle isn’t over. Congress must also reclaim its rightful legislative role by ending the practice of outsourcing lawmaking to executive agencies. Reviving the non-delegation doctrine would mark another crucial step toward restoring constitutional government.
For now, though, conservatives should celebrate this quiet yet profound victory. Step by step, ruling by ruling, President Trump and the conservative-majority Supreme Court continue dismantling the administrative state—making America more faithful to the Constitution, more accountable to its citizens, and more worthy of the sacrifices made by generations of patriots who came before us.
