The White House Pressured the Board That Protects Federal Workers From Political Firing.

Most Americans have never heard of the Merit Systems Protection Board. But the New York Times reports the White House privately pressured it, and what happens to this small agency could reshape the federal workforce and push a wave of firing disputes into the courts.

What the MSPB Is

Congress created the Merit Systems Protection Board to keep politics out of federal employment. It reviews the cases of federal workers who say they were fired or punished for the wrong reasons, and it is supposed to decide those cases on the law and the facts, not on who is in the White House.

That independence is the whole point. Because Congress built the board as a neutral referee, courts have generally required fired employees to take their cases there first, before asking a judge to step in. The system only works if the referee is actually neutral.

The Pressure

The New York Times, in reporting by Michael Schmidt, describes how that neutrality came under strain. The board’s acting chair, Henry Kerner, met with White House officials at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in November 2025.

While Kerner was being considered for the permanent job, administration officials told him they expected him to follow the Justice Department’s legal opinions on “unitary executive” theory, the idea that the president controls the entire executive branch. The message to the person deciding federal workers’ appeals was that the White House had a preferred outcome.

The Ruling That Followed

In March 2026, the board issued a decision backing the president’s claim that Article II of the Constitution lets him reshape the executive branch and dismiss officials without the due process the civil-service laws require. It broke with decades of the board’s own precedent.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has agreed to review that decision, a rare step that signals how far it strayed. A legal analysis at Lawfare put it bluntly, calling the board’s independence dead.

Why the Courts Are the Next Question

The pressure did not happen in isolation. The Supreme Court recently stripped the for-cause protections that shielded independent agencies, and the Merit Systems Protection Board was one of the agencies it named.

Here is the consequence. Courts made employees exhaust the board’s process first precisely because it was independent. If it no longer is, fired workers can argue that the exhaustion requirement no longer holds, and ask federal judges to hear their wrongful-termination claims directly. A board built to keep these disputes out of court could end up funneling them straight into it.

Why It Matters

The stakes go well beyond one obscure board. The real question is whether the system Congress built to protect two million federal workers still works.

The merit system exists so that the scientists, auditors, and inspectors who run the government answer to the law, not to a boss demanding loyalty. When the neutral body that enforces that principle is leaned on to rule the administration’s way, the protection becomes a formality. The reclassification of career workers into at-will employees is the other half of the same effort, and together they remove the guardrails that outlast any single president.

What You Can Do Now

Use the letter below to ask your members of Congress to pass the Saving the Civil Service Act, which would write merit-system protections into law so no executive order or pressured board can strip them away.
Call your senators and representative at (202) 224-3121. Ask them to hold hearings on the reported White House pressure on the Merit Systems Protection Board and to demand it decide cases independently.
If you are a federal worker facing removal, document everything and get counsel. Groups like the Government Accountability Project and federal-employee unions track these cases and the shifting rules on where they can be heard.