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.”
