How much power should presidents have over independent agencies?

For Marketplace, I'm Novosafo and for David Brancaccio.

President Trump's firings of dozens of government officials have raised questions about whether or not those moves are legal.

This week, one lawsuit is challenging the president's power over the various agencies set up by Congress to regulate all sorts of things, from stock markets to telecommunications.

Gwynne Wilcox is suing the Trump administration for removing her from the National Labor Relations Board before her five-year term expired.

No president has done that before in the 90-year history of the bipartisan board.

Last week, Trump also removed two members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, all Democrats.

The NLRB-related lawsuit could pave the way for the Supreme Court to weigh in,

and Rachel C, who previously served as counsel at the EEOC and the NLRB, says the stakes are high.

I think the firings that we saw are an attempt to set up the Supreme Court to overrule a case from

1935 called Humphreys Executor, which limited the power of the president to fire members of some independent commissions.

I think conservative legal scholars have wanted the Supremes to overrule Humphreys for a while.

There's been multiple attempts to get the Supreme Court to revisit it,

and I think the firings that we're seeing will create excellent vehicles for the Supreme Court to revisit it. And I think the firings that we're seeing

will create excellent vehicles for the Supreme Court to take up that issue again.

C counts maybe three votes so far on the High Court, ready to overturn precedent. David Driesen

thinks there are as many as six votes. He's a law professor at Syracuse University and has written critically of the idea of an executive with broad control over independent agencies.

A lot of the agencies that are independent are independent for extremely good reasons in all functioning democracies have independent agencies in certain areas. A big one is the federal election

commission. Election commissions are independent or bipartisan in just about every functioning

democracy, or everyone I know of. Same thing with the Federal Reserve, another independent agencies.

All good, well-functioning governments

recognize that you need to have independence for the central bank because they need to make

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