Myers v. United States: Presidential Removal Power and Its Limits

Myers v. United States, decided by the Supreme Court on October 25, 1926, held that the President has the constitutional power to remove executive branch officers without the Senate’s consent. By a 6–3 vote, the Court struck down an 1876 federal statute that required Senate approval before the President could fire certain postmasters. Nearly a century later, the ruling still anchors the constitutional debate over how much control a president must have over the officials who run federal agencies.

How the Case Arose

On July 21, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Frank Myers as a first-class postmaster in Portland, Oregon, with Senate confirmation. The appointment carried a four-year term. On January 20, 1920, the Postmaster General, acting on Wilson’s instructions, demanded Myers’s resignation. Myers refused. Two weeks later, on February 2, 1920, he was removed by presidential order without a hearing and without any request for Senate consent.¹

Myers protested to the Post Office Department and asked both the President and the Senate Committee on Post Offices for a hearing. Neither responded. Three months before his four-year term would have naturally ended, he sued in the Court of Claims for $8,838.71 in back pay. He lost there and appealed to the Supreme Court.²

The statute Myers relied on was Section 6 of the Act of July 12, 1876. It provided that postmasters of the first, second, and third classes “shall be appointed and may be removed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate,” and that they would hold office for four years unless sooner removed or suspended.² The question for the Court was whether Congress could constitutionally require Senate consent for a removal.

What the Supreme Court Held

Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president, wrote the majority opinion. His reasoning rested on three reinforcing sources of authority.

The first was the Vesting Clause of Article II, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Taft read this as a broad grant of authority that included the power to supervise and dismiss anyone exercising executive functions.³

The second was the Take Care Clause, which requires the President to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” A president who cannot fire an insubordinate or incompetent subordinate, Taft reasoned, cannot meaningfully carry out that duty.²

The third was history. Taft placed heavy weight on the First Congress in 1789, which debated and passed statutes creating the executive departments using language that assumed the President already held the removal power. He treated this as “a legislative declaration that the power to remove officers appointed by the President and the Senate vested in the President alone.” He also pointed to more than a century of practice in which presidents removed officers without Senate involvement and Congress accepted it.²

The holding was sweeping. Congress cannot, by statute, make the President’s power to remove executive officers dependent on Senate consent, nor can it lodge that removal power elsewhere. The 1876 law was unconstitutional, Myers’s removal was valid, and his back-pay claim failed.²

The Dissents

Three justices dissented, and two of the opinions still shape the argument today.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote briefly and pointedly. Congress creates the office, sets its pay and duration, defines its duties, and can abolish it entirely or transfer the appointment power elsewhere. Given that degree of legislative control, Holmes found nothing strange about Congress attaching conditions to removal. He dismissed the majority’s grand claims about executive power as “spider’s webs inadequate to control the dominant facts.”²

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote at length about the purpose of the separation of powers. The framers adopted it, he said, “not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Friction between the branches was the design, not the flaw. Brandeis warned that unchecked removal authority, in the wrong hands, could become “an instrument of the worst oppression and most vindictive vengeance,” and he cited the patronage abuses that had degraded the federal civil service before reform.²

How Humphrey’s Executor Limited Myers

Nine years later, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed Myers. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), President Franklin Roosevelt had fired William Humphrey from the Federal Trade Commission because of policy disagreements. The FTC statute allowed removal only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and Humphrey’s estate sued for back pay.⁴

The Court drew a distinction Myers had not. Myers, it said, applied to “purely executive officers” like postmasters, who serve as direct subordinates of the President. FTC commissioners, by contrast, exercised “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” functions and “cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive.” For those officers, Congress could restrict removal to specified grounds.⁴

That distinction is what made the modern independent regulatory agency possible. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and many others operate under leadership that a president cannot fire simply for policy disagreement.

Why Myers Still Matters Today

Myers is not a historical relic. It sits at the center of the unitary executive theory, which holds that the President must have direct control over everyone exercising executive power. The Supreme Court has returned to Myers repeatedly, and each visit has strengthened it.

In Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010), the Court struck down a structure in which board members could only be removed for cause by SEC commissioners, who in turn could only be removed for cause by the President. That two-layer insulation, the Court held, was “contrary to Article II’s vesting of the executive power in the President.”⁵

In Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), the Court invalidated a for-cause removal restriction on the CFPB’s single director. It described Myers as the “baseline rule” for presidential removal and treated Humphrey’s Executor as a narrow exception limited to multimember bodies exercising quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions. A single director wielding broad executive authority did not fit within it.⁶

A year later, in Collins v. Yellen (2021), the Court applied the same reasoning to the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, holding that “the Constitution prohibits even modest restrictions on the President’s power to remove the head of an agency with a single top officer.”⁷

The direction is consistent. Myers has grown, and the Humphrey’s Executor exception has shrunk. A dispute that began over one Portland postmaster’s back pay now supplies the constitutional framework for arguments about presidential control across the federal government, and the questions Brandeis raised in dissent about concentrated executive power are as contested now as they were in 1926.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Myers v. United States
2
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Myers v. United States
3
Supreme Court of the United States. Executive Vesting Clause – Early Doctrine
4
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States
5
Supreme Court of the United States. Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
6
Supreme Court of the United States. Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
7
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Collins v. Yellen