I could have sworn we resolved this issue about whether the President can fire people already.
Marbury vs. Madison comes to mind - an earlier instance of a president trying to force last minute appointees down the next president's throat.
Myers v. United States (1926) brought Chief Justice William Howard Taft's conclusion that
the power to remove appointed officers is vested in the President alone. According to Taft, to deny the President that power would not allow him to "discharge his own constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be faithfully executed."
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I figure Taft had a basis for his opinion of the powers of the presidency.
Yes, some later cases have put limits on it, but Bowsher v. Synar (1986) clarified those limits to a fair extent.
And given that Executive Order 12838 eliminated roughly a third of advisory committees of the same sort that Mr. Young served on, it would surely seem that that is a power the president has.
In fact, it was exactly that action that President Trump took in 2019!
https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-administration-fires-experts-2645080644.htmlNot that he had not been wiping out such groups since he took office. He most assuredly had.
His attack on the SAB, which Young was later added to, started with the biblically inspired "Joshua Principle" that asserted that anybody who had received a grant from the EPA could not serve on an advisory board. EPA head Pruitt then directed the man in charge of overseeing the boards to fire those with that purported conflict. (They did, however, permit their own appointees to keep outside jobs...)
Shockingly enough, Ward didn't claim that those firings were unconstitutional!
However, the courts did rule that that principle was.
https://www.scribd.com/document/369825603/Union-of-Concerned-Scientists-and-Elizabeth-Anne-Sheppard-v-Scott-Pruitt-18-10129
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