'Remarkable': Eyebrows raise as court reverses course on high-profile Trump firings

A federal appeals court panel in Washington, D.C. changed its mind on Monday and reinstated a lower court order they lifted weeks before, once again blocking President Donald Trump from carrying out a mass purge of banking regulators.

And the judge who flipped to cast the deciding vote was appointed by Trump.

In February, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson temporarily blocked the Trump administration from firing additional employees or destroying consumer information files at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency established in 2011 to police banks and other financial institutions from engaging in predatory behavior against borrowers, depositors, and other clients.

Trump, egged on by tech billionaire Elon Musk and over a decade of Republicans who have vowed to destroy the agency, had immediately begun laying off staff after he took office, prompting a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union.

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Jackson granted the union's request for a temporary block on additional firings while the case proceeds, writing that Trump's actions “were taken in complete disregard for the decision Congress made 15 years ago, which was spurred by the devastating financial crisis of 2008 and embodied in the United States Code, that the agency must exist and that it must perform specific functions to protect the borrowing public.”

Earlier this month, a three-judge panel that included Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, lifted that order, though they were clear at the outset they weren't ruling on the merits of the case.

“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for stay pending appeal.”

Immediately after Jackson's order was stayed, however, Trump's appointees at CFPB immediately tried to fire "90% of the workforce," per Lawfare's Roger Parloff — and this week, the same three-judge panel ruled to reinstate the order, with Katsas being the deciding vote who changed sides.

"Remarkable order by 2-1 DC Circuit panel restores Judge Amy Berman Jackson's ban on CFPB reductions in force pending appeal," Parloff concluded. Rao, the other Trump appointee on the panel, dissented from the decision.