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President Donald Trump arrives to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images).
A Democratic member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent administrative agency tasked with administering “labor-management relations” for over 2 million government workers, was “unlawfully removed” by President Donald Trump last month, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
Susan Tsui Grundmann, who was axed on Feb. 11, has been suing the Trump administration for what she claims was an “unconstitutional” removal from the FLRA, which is a three-member agency charged by Congress with “managing federal labor relations” in an “unbiased” and “fair” way that she says is not supposed to “shift with political whims.” With Grundmann in, the FLRA would have a 2-1 Democratic majority until her term expires in July.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan handed down her ruling in the case — siding with Grundmann and her argument that Trump’s firing of her was “unlawful” — after the Justice Department argued Article II of the Constitution gave Trump the power to remove executive branch officials without cause, including members of the FLRA.
“The Government vigorously defends Ms. Grundmann’s hasty termination on the basis that the Constitution vests the entirety of the ‘executive Power’ in the President,” Sooknanan said. “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances. Our Founders recognized that the concentration of power in one branch of government would spell disaster.”
Grundmann is one of several federal officials fighting in court after being booted by Trump over the past two months. Thousands of government workers have also been fired amid a massive push to cut costs and eliminate employees who aren’t “mission-critical” to the president’s agenda. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, nearly 6,000 USDA workers have gotten their pink slips since Trump took office in January.
Sooknanan said Wednesday that Grundmann had met her burden to receive a permanent injunction reinstating her until July, when her term ends, by highlighting separation-of-powers concerns, as the FLRA was created by Congress to be an independent voice for the federal workforce. Sooknanan said Trump’s DOJ had actually helped Grundmann make her case.
“The Government takes the position that this Court lacks the authority to provide meaningful relief in these circumstances,” Sooknanan explained. “It argues that where a President removes a Senate-confirmed federal officer in violation of a duly enacted and constitutional statute, the only recourse is an award of backpay to that officer. Why? According to the Government, any order from this Court that results in the officer continuing her role against the President’s will would raise grave separation-of-powers concerns. In other words, where a President exceeds his power under Article II of the Constitution and intrudes on Congress’s Article I authority, the Government’s position is that an Article III court may not interpret the law and redress the resulting injury.”
Sooknanan concluded, “It is the Government’s own argument that raises grave separation-of-powers concerns. There can be no doubt that ‘the President is bound to abide by the requirements of duly enacted and otherwise constitutional statutes.’ And it is precisely the role of an Article III court to step in when that does not happen.”
When Congress formed the FLRA in 1978, it gave members five-year terms and ordered that they could only be removed “upon notice and hearing and only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” according to Sooknanan.
“In the nearly fifty years since the FLRA’s creation, no President has ever removed a Member,” the judge noted. “Until now.”
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While Grundmann’s reinstatement may be a legal win for federal workers, Trump’s DOJ has already managed to get a similar judgment reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who gave Trump the green light last week to finally fire Hampton Dellinger — a booted-then-reinstated ethics enforcer who led the Office of Special Counsel — following weeks of legal jousting and the threat of a Supreme Court battle.
The three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit unanimously agreed to let Trump terminate Dellinger, who was appointed by Joe Biden in 2024 to enforce whistleblower laws, roughly a month after he tried axing the OSC head in a one-sentence email. Dellinger fought the firing with a lawsuit filed in federal court, which led to a temporary restraining order (TRO) being issued by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Feb. 12 and extended by her until last Saturday, when Jackson ruled in favor of letting Dellinger stay on board at OSC for the rest of his five-year term, which was set to end in March 2029. Jackson’s decision came after multiple failed attempts to get her TRO tossed last month, including an unsuccessful first bid in the appeals court. Judges Karen Henderson, Justin Walker and Patricia Millett saw things differently, though, when it came time for them to rule on the merits of Dellinger’s firing.
“Appellants have satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending appeal,” the panel said Wednesday, noting how an opinion would “follow in due course” at a later date. “This order gives effect to the removal of appellee from his position as Special Counsel of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.”
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