White House Secretly Pressured the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Agency That Shields Civil Servants From Politicized Firings

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In a June 2026 investigation, The New York Times reported that the Trump White House "went to extensive lengths"—in public and, crucially, in private—to push the Merit Systems Protection Board, the independent agency whose entire purpose is to protect federal workers from unfair firings, to adopt the administration's maximalist theory of presidential power. The private effort culminated in a March 2026 board ruling that, in the Times's telling, "crashed down like a thunderbolt" on the world of federal employment law: for the first time in its history, the board accepted the argument that Article II of the Constitution lets the president dismiss certain officials without the due-process protections the board has enforced for nearly five decades. The Times, whose account was written by Jonah E. Bromwich, Michael S. Schmidt and Rebecca Davis O'Brien and based on people with knowledge of the process, described the private push as "little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule."

The story, widely picked up by other outlets and discussed on MSNBC, is significant less for any single meeting than for what it completes. Over eighteen months, the administration fired the board's Democratic chair, won a Supreme Court order keeping her out while litigation continued, restored the board's quorum with two Republicans, flooded it with appeals from tens of thousands of dismissed workers, issued a Justice Department opinion instructing it how to treat the president's constitutional claims, and then—according to the Times—privately told its acting chair, whose own tenure the president could end at will, that he was bound to follow that opinion. The board then ruled the administration's way.

What the Board Is, and Why Its Independence Was the Point

The Merit Systems Protection Board is a three-member, quasi-judicial agency created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which split the old Civil Service Commission in two: the Office of Personnel Management to manage the workforce for the president, and the MSPB to serve as an independent arbiter when agencies fire, demote, or suspend career employees. As the Partnership for Public Service explains, the board's administrative judges hear appeals in the first instance, and the Senate-confirmed board members—no more than two from one party, serving fixed seven-year terms—decide petitions for review. University of Minnesota law professor Nick Bednar, writing in Lawfare, notes that the Senate committee report on the 1978 law called the board's independence the "cornerstone" of civil service reform: Congress stripped federal courts of most jurisdiction over employment disputes precisely because it was promising employees a neutral adjudicator "insulated from the kinds of political pressures that have led to violations of merit principles in the past."

The board's independence has failed before, but by neglect rather than capture. It lacked a quorum for the entirety of Trump's first term—from 2017 to 2022—and accumulated a backlog of roughly 3,800 petitions that a Biden-restored board worked through only by fall 2024. Among President Biden's appointees were Cathy Harris, a Democrat who became chair, and Henry Kerner, a Republican who in Trump's first term had led the Office of Special Counsel—where, notably, it fell to him to inform Trump that senior adviser Kellyanne Conway had violated the Hatch Act.

Firing the Chair, Rebuilding the Board

In February 2025, at the start of the mass dismissals across government, Trump purported to fire Harris without cause—something the statute, on its face, does not allow. Harris sued; the D.C. Circuit ultimately upheld the removal in Harris v. Bessent, and the Supreme Court had already blocked her reinstatement while the litigation proceeded. Harris asked the Supreme Court to review the decision. With member Raymond Limon's term expiring the same month, the board lost its quorum from March to October 2025—precisely the months when appeals from the mass firings were surging—leaving Kerner alone at the top of the agency.

Quorum returned on October 8, 2025, when the Senate confirmed James J. Woodruff II, a Trump nominee, on a 51-47 party-line vote. That left the board with two Republicans—Kerner, still awaiting nomination as permanent chair, and Woodruff, a newly seated member—and a vacant Democratic seat. Both men served knowing what had happened to Harris: nothing in the courts' emerging doctrine appeared to stop the president from firing either of them. On June 29, 2026—the day after the Times story ran online—the Supreme Court removed any doubt, ruling 6-3 in the FTC case of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter that the president may remove members of multimember boards at will, effectively overruling the 91-year-old Humphrey's Executor precedent and, as NPR noted, throwing "into question the protections afforded to members" of agencies like the MSPB.

A Board Buried in Appeals From the Mass Firings

The stakes of controlling the board grew with its docket. After the 2025 firings—probationary terminations, reductions in force, and dismissals justified by nothing more than a citation to the president's constitutional authority—the MSPB became, as the Times put it, the "last resort" for scores of workers. By May 24, 2025, the board had received 11,166 appeals, roughly double a typical year's workload; by year's end the total approached 12,000, against 5,677 in all of 2024, with weekly filings running near 468 versus 96 at the end of 2024—all handled by a staff that had shrunk from 214 employees in 2018 to about 174. The board's own FY 2025 annual performance report documents the caseload surge, and practitioners reported that even after quorum returned, many petitions sat unreviewed. Senate Democrats, arguing the administration had deliberately hobbled the board, introduced legislation (S. 2977) to let employees go straight to federal court if the MSPB fails to act within 120 days.

The Pressure Campaign

The Times traces the private campaign to James Sherk, a special assistant to the president who has spent much of his career trying to make federal workers easier to fire. At the Heritage Foundation, Sherk produced policy papers on civil-service "waste and abuse" and told lawmakers in 2014 that "federal law makes it very difficult to separate federal employees from their jobs," identifying the MSPB as a key obstacle—even though, as the Times notes, the board has historically sided with agencies in the vast majority of cases. In Trump's first term he devoted entire White House meetings to the board and designed Schedule F, the plan to strip employment protections from policy-influencing career positions that was signed just before the 2020 election and reversed by Biden. At the America First Policy Institute, his 2022 report "Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump" again cast the MSPB as a roadblock—while conceding that changing civil-service law was up to Congress.

The second term took a different path. In September 2025, Maurene Comey—the Manhattan federal prosecutor, daughter of the former FBI director, fired with a bare citation to Article II—sued, arguing her case belonged in federal court partly because the MSPB "cannot and does not" function as intended and had long refused to opine on the president's Article II authority. A little over a week later, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying the opposite: the MSPB should weigh in on the Article II cases. (A White House official told the Times there was no connection between Comey's suit and the opinion.) The board had historically avoided the question for a reason bordering on the existential: if Article II lets the president fire any federal worker notwithstanding the Civil Service Reform Act, the board—a creature of that same statute—might itself be unconstitutional.

Then came the meeting. On November 21, according to the Times, Kerner was summoned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to meet with Sherk, then-Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, and Stefanie Wehagen, an associate counsel in the White House Counsel's Office. The officials—who, per the Times, "seemed to understand the sensitivity of even discussing the board's work"—said explicitly that they were not telling Kerner how to rule. But they conveyed that they believed the board was bound to follow the OLC's Article II opinion, including in the pending case of two fired immigration judges, Megan Jackler and Brandon Jaroch. Four days later, Kerner gathered a small group of staff and recounted the meeting; he seemed, in the words of the Times's sources, "shaken and unsure how to proceed." The context made the message hard to miss: Kerner was under consideration for the permanent chairmanship, the administration had already fired his Democratic colleague, and the courts were letting that firing stand.

The March Ruling

In March 2026, the board ruled in the immigration judges' case. It did not follow the OLC opinion to the letter—it explicitly declined to decide whether it was bound by the guidance—but the result aligned with the White House's aims. The two Republican members reversed an administrative judge who had overturned the firings, holding that immigration judges are "inferior officers" under the Constitution who may be removed at will, and that the removal protections of 5 U.S.C. § 7513 could not constitutionally be applied to them. As Government Executive reported, the board wrote that "if we find that a particular employee is subject to at-will Article II removal, we must dismiss their appeal for lack of jurisdiction"—while cautioning that an agency cannot strip the board's jurisdiction "merely by invoking Article II."

For the first time in its history, the board had entertained a constitutional argument that, taken to its logical end, would invalidate its own existence—and sided with presidential power. Raymond Limon, the former board member, told the Times: "That was a monumental decision, reversing years of board law and determining who and who does not get board protections... It is seismic." Some federal employment specialists, the Times reported, equated the ruling's significance within civil-service law to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Nathaniel Zelinsky, the attorney for Jackler and Jaroch, called the decision "dead wrong" and warned it could turn federal employment into a "corrupt patronage system." The immediate practical effect is that agencies citing Article II can move whole categories of employees—immigration judges today, potentially prosecutors and others tomorrow—outside the board's protection; practitioners note the ruling has already spawned jurisdictional confusion in other appeals.

The ruling is not final. On June 17, 2026, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed to hear the case en banc—a rare step, skipping the usual three-judge panel, that underscores the stakes. Federal employee unions, professional associations, and Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen and Michael Bennet filed amicus briefs urging reversal, arguing the board misread Supreme Court precedent on inferior officers. Hundreds of Justice Department employees—including January 6 prosecutors—have been fired under the Article II theory, and the en banc decision will likely set the rule for all of them, with the Supreme Court plausibly next.

Why the Contact Itself Is the Scandal

The legal community's objection is not only to the ruling's substance but to how it came about. The MSPB is an adjudicator: it decides contested cases between the government and individual employees, under statutes that promise a neutral tribunal. A party to those cases—the executive branch—privately telling the decisionmaker what legal framework it was "bound" to apply, while that decisionmaker's job and hoped-for promotion sat in the party's hands, is the kind of ex parte contact that would be flatly improper directed at a federal judge; the Times drew exactly that analogy. Bednar put the consequence plainly: "Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law," adding that it "reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service." In his earlier Lawfare analysis, Bednar argued the combination of at-will removal, OLC control, and quorum fragility had already killed the board's independence, and that Congress's decision to funnel employment disputes away from real courts was premised—as the Fourth Circuit has said—on "a functioning and independent MSPB." Public-administration scholar Don Moynihan, in a Substack essay titled "Politicization in the shadow of the shadow docket," reads the episode as part of a broader pattern (this is opinion analysis): interim Supreme Court orders that let removals stand pending litigation create facts on the ground, and nominally independent adjudicators, seeing colleagues removed without consequence, capitulate before any final ruling requires them to.

The Administration's Defense

The White House offers both a factual rebuttal and a constitutional theory. Factually, a White House official told the Times that the November 21 meeting's primary purpose was to interview Kerner for nomination as permanent chair, that officials made a point of saying he was not being told how to rule, and that the notion of a pressure campaign is "categorically false." The board itself declined to comment, and the board's March opinion pointedly reserved the question of whether OLC guidance binds it—evidence, on the administration's account, that the board exercised independent judgment.

The constitutional argument is more sweeping, and the administration makes it openly. "There can constitutionally be no independent executive branch agencies," White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster told the Times, "because independence from the president would mean independence from the voters who elected him." On this unitary-executive view, communicating the president's legal position to an executive-branch adjudicator is not improper pressure but ordinary supervision—and the Supreme Court's June 29 Slaughter decision, with Chief Justice Roberts writing that "subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him," has moved constitutional doctrine substantially in the administration's direction. The strongest good-faith case for the administration is that it believes civil-service tenure protections genuinely insulate an unaccountable bureaucracy from elections, that it pressed that position through formal legal channels (an OLC opinion, litigation, executive orders) as well as informal ones, and that the courts—not just a pressured board—are increasingly ratifying the underlying theory. The counterpoint is categorical: even if the president may remove board members, Congress by statute made the MSPB's adjudication of individual employees' cases independent, and secretly leaning on a tribunal in pending cases corrupts the process regardless of who ultimately wins the constitutional argument.

The Machinery Keeps Moving

Whatever the Federal Circuit does, the administration has kept building. On June 3, 2026, Trump signed an executive order implementing "Schedule Policy/Career"—the renamed Schedule F—moving roughly 8,000 positions, nearly all senior GS-15 policy roles, into an at-will category with no right to appeal dismissals to the MSPB; a White House fact sheet framed it as workforce accountability, and OPM Director Scott Kupor called it a "restoration... of the democratic process," while critics warned it revives the spoils system for the government's most senior career experts. The order was Sherk's. The Times closes its investigation in the Oval Office at the signing: Trump, told the idea was Sherk's, summoned him to the Resolute Desk. Sherk explained that policymakers would now be treated like private-sector workers—"If they're messing up, they can be removed quickly." "That's great," Trump replied. "And you were very much involved in this?" "I was, sir."

What remains genuinely open is narrow but consequential: whether the en banc Federal Circuit (and eventually the Supreme Court) ratifies the board's Article II ruling; whether Cathy Harris's case produces any limit after Slaughter; and whether Congress, as Bednar and Senate Democrats have proposed, reroutes federal employees' appeals to actual courts. What is no longer open is the premise of the 1978 bargain. Federal employees gave up their day in court in exchange for an independent tribunal. The Times's reporting establishes—through a documented meeting, a shaken chairman, and a ruling that followed—that the tribunal's independence is now, at minimum, reasonably in doubt for the roughly 12,000 workers whose cases sit before it.