Since last week’s Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Slaughter, other federal officials who sued after being terminated by President Trump are coming to grips with the new reality.
Yesterday, former Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a Democrat, voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit that she had filed challenging her termination. President Trump had terminated Ms. Samuels and the former Chair of the EEOC, Democrat Charlotte Burrows, in January 2025.
Interestingly, President Trump is the one who appointed Ms. Samuels to the EEOC, during his first term. President Biden named her Vice Chair in 2021.
(Ms. Burrows, who has not filed suit, was originally appointed to the EEOC in 2015 by President Obama, reappointed in 2019 by President Trump, and named Chair of the EEOC by President Biden in 2021.)
After the Slaughter decision was issued last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia gave Ms. Samuels’ legal team until July 16 to explain why Slaughter did not compel dismissal. In response, Ms. Samuels dismissed her lawsuit.
Other former federal officials who are arguably covered by Slaughter are likely to follow Ms. Samuels’ lead, absent a creative (and convincing) argument that Slaughter does not apply in their circumstances. That includes Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board who was terminated by President Trump in 2025.
