The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed President Trump to fire the three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a five-member group that monitors the safety of items like toys, cribs and electronics.
The court’s brief order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The order is not the last word in the case, which is pending in an appeals court and may return to the justices.
In a series of rulings since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has almost without exception given him broad leeway to exercise control over the executive branch, including by firing officials despite a federal law limiting his authority to do so.
The Supreme Court has been chipping away at a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to shield the leaders of independent agencies from politics by making it hard to fire them. In response to an emergency application in late May, the Supreme Court let Mr. Trump remove, for now, the leaders of two other agencies: Cathy A. Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne A. Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board.
The majority wrote that Mr. Trump could remove officials who exercised power on his behalf “because the Constitution vests the executive power in the president.”
As for the product safety board, Mr. Trump notified the three commissioners in early May that he was removing them. Although a federal law allows them to be terminated only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” the president gave no reasons for the firings.
He has said that congressional limits on his ability to remove leaders of independent agencies are an unconstitutional check on the president’s power to control the executive branch.
The commissioners — Mary T. Boyle, Richard L. Trumka Jr. and Alexander Hoehn-Saric — said they had been targeted for votes they had cast to stop the import of poorly made lithium-ion batteries and for objecting to staffing cuts.
The three officials were forbidden from entering their offices unescorted and from using the agency’s computer system.
About a month later, Judge Matthew J. Maddox of the Federal District Court in Maryland reinstated them, and they resumed their work.
Judge Maddox, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the 1935 Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, barred the firings.
In an unsigned order on July 1, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., rejected the administration’s request for a pause of Judge Maddox’s ruling.
In a concurring opinion, Judge James A. Wynn Jr., who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote that Humphrey’s Executor had not been overruled and governed the case.
In that decision, the court ruled that Congress could protect the Federal Trade Commission from politics by requiring that its commissioners could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired a commissioner, William Humphrey. The only reason he gave was that Mr. Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals.
Mr. Humphrey died a few months later, and his estate sued to recover the pay he would have received during that time. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the firing had been unlawful and that the statute at issue was constitutional.
In the new case, lawyers for the three commissioners argued that the structure and mandate of their agency closely resembled that of the Federal Trade Commission, making the recent firings unlawful.
The Supreme Court has been laying the groundwork for overturning Humphrey’s Executor. In 2020, it seemed to telegraph its plans to do so in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“In our constitutional system,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority, “the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
But the chief justice drew distinctions between agencies led by a single director, like the C.F.P.B., and bodies with multiple members, like the product safety agency. Still, several justices said they did not think the differences were meaningful.
In the administration’s emergency application in the case involving the consumer products agency, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said the court’s emergency order in May involving the two other officials “squarely controls this case.”
“If anything,” he wrote, “this is an even stronger case.” If the commissioners were allowed to remain in their jobs, he noted, Democrats would constitute a majority in the agency and would be able to block Mr. Trump’s agenda.
In response, lawyers for the commissioners wrote that two federal appeals courts had rejected similar challenges just last year. In one of them, Judge Don R. Willett, writing for the majority of a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, said the agency was “a mirror image of the Federal Trade Commission,” whose members the Supreme Court protected in the 1935 decision.
That meant that “Humphrey’s does settle the question,” wrote Judge Willett, who was appointed by Mr. Trump.
“Only the Supreme Court has power to reconsider that New Deal-era precedent — perhaps reaffirming it, overruling it or narrowing it,” the judge wrote. “And at least so far, it hasn’t.”
Zach Montague contributed from Washington.