Cybersecurity Policy Report, Fired Privacy Board Members Ask Court to Rule Expeditiously on Their Fate, (Jul 31, 2026)
Fired members of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) have asked an appeals court for a speedy resolution of their challenge to President Trump’s decision last year to dismiss them from the board.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year placed the case on hold while the Supreme Court considered whether the president could fire members of the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter (CPR, Oct. 1, 2025). The court ruled in June that the president’s firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was lawful.
The cases are similar in that the PCLOB and FTC are both independent executive branch agencies, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Slaughter case set a precedent that might apply to the PCLOB.
The president’s removal of Travis LeBlanc and Edward Felten from the PCLOB was ruled unlawful last year by Senior Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court in Washington, who cited a 1935 Supreme Court precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States to support his ruling (CPR, May 21, 2025).
The Supreme Court tossed the Humphrey’s Executor precedent in the Slaughter case.
The administration appealed Judge Walton’s decision and won a stay from the D.C. appeals court that blocked Judge Walton’s ruling from going into effect while the appeal played out (LeBlanc, et al. v. U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, et al., No. 25-5197 (D.C. Cir. May 29, 2025)).
Now Messrs. LeBlanc and Felten want the appeals court to quickly decide their fate. The “sole remaining question” in their case “is one of statutory interpretation: whether the PCLOB’s organic statute protects Board members from removal without cause, as the district court correctly found,” they said in an unopposed motion to expedite oral argument.
In a joint motion filed with the administration, Messrs. LeBlanc and Felten proposed an Aug. 21 deadline for both sides to file “supplemental briefs to address the effects of Slaughter ... on this case.”
“The narrow scope of the issues remaining for supplemental briefing ... and the extraordinary length of this appeal to date all support setting oral argument expeditiously,” they told the court. “Appellees have been unlawfully deprived of the benefits of their office, notwithstanding a final judgment in their favor, for more than a year.”
They noted that Mr. Felten’s PCLOB term expired last January, while Mr. LeBlanc’s ends in 2028, and said that “every additional month of delay further diminishes the relief to which he [Mr. LeBlanc] is entitled and inflicts irreparable harm that no subsequent order can undo.”
Messrs. LeBlanc and Felten and PCLOB Chair Sharon Bradford Franklin, the board’s Democratic appointees, were fired in January 2025 shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, leaving the board with only a single Republican member, Beth Williams, and depriving it of a quorum to conduct much of its business.
Created by the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 as an independent executive branch agency, the PCLOB’s mission is to assess the effect of federal surveillance laws on Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.
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