Roll Call: “President Donald Trump’s firing of inspectors general and independent agency board members in the last week sets up another major legal clash over Congress’ power to put limits on the removal of federal officials, experts said. Since Friday, Trump removed more than a dozen inspectors general and Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and National Labor Relations Board, which Democrats and experts have criticized as violating legal protections on their removal. Andrea Katz, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in administrative agencies, said the firings appear to be “deliberately violating the law to provide a test case” to see if the Supreme Court will side with his efforts to control the executive branch. “This is a very precarious moment for the legislative power, with the courts potentially kneecapping Congress’ ability to legislate what the executive branch can do,” Katz said. Trump appears to be betting that the Supreme Court, currently controlled 6-3 by Republican appointees, will continue along a line of reasoning in prior cases where they expressed skepticism on limits Congress placed on the president’s control of the executive branch.

Washington Post – “President Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a landmark confrontation over his authority to strike federal spending and regulation, as the White House looks to reconfigure vast swaths of the U.S. government even without approval from Congress. Only days into his second term, Trump’s extraordinary steps have challenged a fundamental principle of the Constitution: control over the power of the purse, which the president has looked to partly wrest away from lawmakers so that he can shape the federal budget as he wishes. Already, Trump’s actions have triggered significant legal clashes. In one case, lawyers with the Justice Department on Thursday defended Trump’s ability to “lawfully direct agencies to implement the president’s agenda,” describing a pause in the disbursement of federal funds as “commonplace.”