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WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s firing of two Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
The ruling Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ends the lawsuit brought by two of the three fired board members in February.
The five-member board is an independent watchdog agency housed within the executive branch. Congress created the agency after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and tasked the board members with making sure the federal government’s counterterrorism policies are balanced against privacy and civil liberties.
Former board members Travis LeBlanc and Edward Felten asked the judge to find that board members can’t be fired without cause. Otherwise, they said, members would fear that criticizing the executive branch would lead to their dismissal, effectively rendering the agency unable to give candid, independent advice to Congress.
The third Democratic board member removed by Trump had just two days left in her six-year term and did not sue. Another board seat was already vacant, leaving just one Republican-appointed member on the board.
That’s well short of the quorum required for the agency to perform any significant activities, including the duties mandated by Congress like an in-the-works report on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, LeBlanc and Felten said in the lawsuit.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Dreier told the judge the law creating the agency doesn’t include any protections from removal for board members. That’s not the case in other congressionally-created independent boards, where special protections from removal were written into statute, Dreier wrote in court documents.
He said the judge should not add a protection that Congress declined to grant, suggesting that would be akin to stepping into a legislative role.
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