President Donald Trump’s attempt to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development has stunned its employees and drawn outrage among Democrats on Capitol Hill. But it’s one of many brazen attacks on independent federal agencies as he seeks to expand executive power during his first days in office.

On Jan. 27, the new president ousted a sitting Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as two Democratic commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He eliminated a quorum at both bipartisan bodies, making them unable to carry out their normal duties.

Then, on Thursday, Trump tried to boot the Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, who said she had received a letter from the president ”purporting to remove me.” “There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners,” said the chairwoman, Ellen L. Weintraub. “This isn’t it.”

With Senate approval, any president is free to fill out his Cabinet as he sees fit. But Trump is taking an axe to walls that have long stood between the White House and independent executive agencies that are supposed to operate free from presidential meddling.

The NLRB and EEOC officials were in the middle of their congressionally mandated terms when Trump fired them without cause. The removals flew in the face of the statute as well as U.S. Supreme Court precedent and should dash any notion that Trump might act with a degree of restraint in his second term.

“They are blowing through every guardrail,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes executive branch nominees. “They want to challenge the entire precept of independence.”

Trump’s upending of the NLRB, which enforces collective-bargaining law, illustrates just how much he’s broken with precedent ― and what the long-term costs could be.

The labor board usually has five members, with three from one party and two from the other. Their staggered five-year terms mean a Democratic majority can run into a Republican presidency, and vice versa, until one of the seats opens up and the president can install a new member.

Due to two vacancies, the board held a 2-1 Democratic majority when Trump was inaugurated. It still had a quorum, by one member, to make rulings. Close observers did not expect Trump to try to fire one of the Democrats since he could achieve a GOP majority simply by nominating two Republicans and getting them through a Republican-controlled Senate.

Instead, he fired Democrat Gwynne Wilcox, whose term was supposed to run through August 2028. The National Labor Relations Act explicitly states that a member can only be removed for “neglect of duty” or “malfeasance” after notice and a hearing are given. Wilcox faced no such accusations and received no warning.

“I found it shocking,” said Wilma Liebman, a former Democratic board member.

The circumstances make clear Trump was not interested in simply changing the direction of board policy and making it more employer-friendly ― an outcome he could achieve, like other Republican presidents before him, with new nominations. Instead, he was grabbing at power and, by eliminating the board’s quorum, grinding a federal body’s work to a halt.

“It has the intent, I suppose, of trying to transform a neutral, objective, adjudicatory body into Trump’s henchmen,” Liebman said. “It’s not absolutely clear to me that what they’re after is installing their own people. We’ll see if they make nominations and who they nominate. To me, it seems that the obvious first intent is to create chaos and make the agency inoperative.”

In a letter to Wilcox, the White House asserted that Trump was not bound by the law’s prohibition on firing her without cause and that the Constitution grants the executive branch power to do so. It also accused Wilcox, who was the first Black woman to serve on the board, of being unable to carry out her duties “without unduly disfavoring the interests of employers large and small.”

The message seems to be that any board member that fails to serve businesses at the expense of workers will be removed, said Celine McNicholas, director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank.

“The biggest thing to me is just the way in which this went down, and their own articulation of why these folks were fired,” said McNicholas, a former special counsel at the NLRB.

If Wilcox’s firing is left to stand, then “it’s not an independent agency anymore,” she went on. “It’s folks who serve at the pleasure of the president.”

The NLRB is one of the agencies targeted by Trump ally and billionaire Elon Musk. The agency’s prosecutor brought a case against his rocket company, SpaceX, for allegedly breaking the law by firing workers who’d openly criticized him. SpaceX responded by filing a lawsuit seeking to have the agency’s structure declared unconstitutional.

As that case percolates in federal court, Trump has already accomplished, at least temporarily, what Musk has set out to do: render the board unable to function.

With just two members and no quorum, the NLRB cannot adjudicate cases where an employer or union has filed an appeal. The board won’t be operating until either a judge reinstates Wilcox — she has filed a lawsuit arguing her firing was illegal — or Trump and Senate Republicans install new members, which they may be in no rush to do.

Trump has left the EEOC in a similar dysfunctional state. The agency, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, has stressed that it’s still fielding complaints and that its judges are hearing cases involving workers who believe their civil rights have been violated. However, it only has two commissioners —one Republican and one Democrat — who would be unable to issue new rules or policies until Trump installs new members.

Like the NLRB, the EEOC has accused one of Musk’s businesses of breaking the law. The agency sued Tesla in 2023, accusing the automaker of “tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment.”

The independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has also found itself in the White House’s crosshairs. On Saturday, Trump’s acting CFPB director ordered employees to halt their work and closed down the building, derailing an agency that protects consumers from predatory financial practices. Musk had previously said he wanted to “delete” the bureau.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Trump and Musk aren’t trying to make the government more “efficient”— they’re simply going after regulatory agencies they dislike.

“We are in dangerous territory because we see this sort of serial lawbreaking by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Van Hollen told HuffPost Monday. “It has nothing to do with efficiency... This is all about installing their cronies in key positions in government and shutting down agencies that help protect the American people.”

Trump’s firings at independent agencies may be headed to the Supreme Court in a battle over the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president has sole authority over executive branch agencies. The court’s conservative supermajority has generally taken a broad view of presidential power and could bless Trump’s takeover of bodies like the NLRB.

That outcome could be disastrous for an agency that’s already “polarized and politicized to start with,” said Liebman.

“To the extent that there’s a board that’s collegial… it can be constructive, it can be healthy,” she said. “But in this environment, it’s just become much more toxic.”

Nothing in the law requires a 3-2 ideological split in the board’s makeup — that’s simply been a tradition since the board’s creation in 1935. Trump could theoretically stack the board with four or five Republicans, setting a precedent that Democratic presidents would naturally follow with their own firings.

But for now, there is no quorum and no immediate sign that Trump and Republicans will create one. So SpaceX and myriad other employers can reap the benefits of disorder as union-busting cases languish and union organizing campaigns suffer as a result. Amazon-owned Whole Foods has already taken advantage of the situation, using the lack of a quorum to dispute its workers’ recent election victory at a downtown Philadelphia store.

Hauser said he could see board dysfunction eventually leading to labor unrest, particularly if the economy takes a dip. Workers who see no legal check on employer behavior would be more likely to assert themselves outside the bounds of labor law — perhaps through illegal strikes and boycotts — shaking the stability that Republicans and employers take for granted.

“Nobody is going to be able to rely on things like before,” he said. “It becomes a much more cutthroat world.”