President Donald Trump fired two commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission late Monday night, drawing rebukes from Democrats who called the ousters an illegal power grab.
Jocelyn Samuels, one of the agency’s Democratic commissioners, said in a statement on X, formerly called Twitter, that she received an email from the White House notifying her that Trump was “removing me from my position.”
She called the decision to fire her before her term is over an “unprecedented” move that “violates the law.”
“I am considering my legal options and will continue to advocate strenuously for the civil rights of all workers,” Samuels said.
Charlotte A. Burrows, the commission’s former chair, said she was also fired on Monday night. She said the removal of her and Samuels would “undermine the efforts” of the EEOC, which investigates discrimination and enforces civil rights law in the workplace.
Burrows had more than three years left on her term.
The New York Times reported that Trump also fired the agency’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride.
The EEOC declined to comment and referred HuffPost to the White House.
Trump’s firing of the EEOC officials mirrors similar moves he made late Monday at another independent workplace regulator, the National Labor Relations Board. The new president removed the NLRB’s Democratic general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, and one of its Democratic board members, Gwynne Wilcox.
In an email, a White House spokesperson called the officials “far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law.”
“[T]hey have no place as senior appointees in the Trump Administration, which was given a mandate by the American people to undo the radical policies they created,” the spokesperson said.
While the White House noted that former President Joe Biden fired Trump’s previous general counsels at the EEOC and NLRB, Biden did not remove commissioners or board members at those agencies before their terms were up.
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The firings are likely to prompt legal challenges over whether the president has the power to dismiss such officials at independent agencies serving Senate-confirmed terms. Under a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent, the president can’t do so except in cases of neglect of duty or malfeasance.
Washington state Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat on the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, called the firings “alarming” and “illegal” on Tuesday.
“These are yet more lawless actions by a president who thinks he is above the law and clearly could not care less about the rights of workers,” Murray said.