Supreme Court temporarily prevents Trump from dismissing the director of the Office of Special Counsel

The Supreme Court determined Friday, that President Donald Trump cannot remove Hampton Dellinger, director of the Office of Special Counselat least while the legal challenge against his firing continues. The decision, issued in a brief, unsigned order, leaves open the possibility that the court could take up the case again in the coming days, as the restraining order protecting Dellinger expires next week.

Court split on intervention

While some justices opted to uphold the temporary restraining order, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito expressed their disagreement. Gorsuch argued that the order barring dismissal should already be considered appealable and that prolonging it only reinforces judicial interference with executive decisions. In contrast, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that they would not even have agreed to Trump's request for court intervention.

A key case in Trump's strategy

This case has become a point of friction between the executive and the judiciaryover the president's authority to reshuffle his administration. Dellinger, who took office last year after his Senate confirmation, was removed by the Trump administration via a terse email on Feb. 7, without further explanation. In response, he filed a lawsuit to challenge his dismissal, prompting a federal judge to issue a temporary injunction allowing him to remain in office while the case was being analyzed.

The White House contends that this judicial intervention interferes with presidential authority to manage the executive branch, citing recent precedents in which the Supreme Courtreaffirmed the president's power to remove heads of agencies run by a single person. In 2021, following a ruling on the Federal Housing Finance Agency, President Joe Biden removed its director and shortly thereafter applied the same logic to terminate the head of the Social Security Administration.

Sarah M. Harris, acting attorney general, called the judicial intervention "an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers" and warned that these decisions limit the president's ability to reorganize the government early in his term. "These judicial rulings irreparably harm the presidency by curtailing the president’s ability to manage the executive branch in the earliest days of his administration," he explained.