The case joins a rising number of legal challenges to President Trump’s firing spree that has violated limits on his power.
Two former members of an independent civil liberties watchdog agency who were fired by President Trump sued the government on Monday, asking a court to declare their terminations illegal and reinstate them to their former positions.
The lawsuit is the latest in a deluge of litigation arising from Mr. Trump’s firings of officials as part of an assault on the basic structure of the federal government.
The former officials, Travis LeBlanc and Edward W. Felten, were among three Democratic-selected members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board whom Mr. Trump ousted on Jan. 27. He also dismissed a third member, Sharon Bradford Franklin, but she was due to depart two days later anyway and did not join the lawsuit.
A fourth seat was already vacant, so the departures left the five-member board with only one member, Beth Williams, who had been chosen by Republicans. The removals paralyzed the agency by leaving it without enough members to take official actions like starting an investigative project or issuing a board report with a policy recommendation.
In the opening weeks of his second term, Mr. Trump has been on a firing spree — violating statutes in which Congress set limits on when a president may remove certain types of officials. Many of those summary firings have led to lawsuits, apparently setting up test cases to see whether the Supreme Court will expand presidential power by striking the laws down as infringing on Mr. Trump’s constitutional powers.
Many of those cases, however, center on explicit limits Congress wrote into law that say presidents cannot fire particular types of officials at will, but only for a cause like misconduct. Such lawsuits include Mr. Trump’s firings of members of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board.