In their only debate in 2024, Donald Trump pointed out that Joe Biden never fired anybody, no matter how badly they failed at their job. So far, Trump is taking the opposite approach. From probationary employees to the heads of independent agencies, for reasons ranging from budgetary to ideological to personal, the President is cleaning house.

But the former host of The Apprentice is now discovering that in the federal Government, it’s not as easy as just saying “you’re fired.” Precedents signal that he may succeed where others have failed, but a new case that has reached the Supreme Court proves it won’t be easy.

Earlier this month, Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, the director of the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that deals with the federal workforce, mostly in the area of whistleblower protection. Soon after, a district court judge reinstated Dellinger because the statute creating the office says that the special counsel “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Trump’s email firing Delllinger made no mention of any of these, nor of any other reason for the dismissal — it is not clear why Trump even felt compelled to replace him.

This case has now made it all the way up to the Supreme Court. What the court decides will have a big effect on the President’s ability to remake the federal workforce — determining, in effect, whether he will be able to have his own people enact the agenda he was elected to pursue, or whether he will have an entrenched Left-wing bureaucracy fighting against him every step of the way.

New presidents bring in new officials to work under them, and in many cases it is uncontroversial. Ambassadors come and go with the change in party in Washington, as do US Attorneys. Others, though, are intended by Congress to stay in their jobs no matter who is president. OSC is one of those. The question that the court will have to decide is whether the Constitution allows Congress to place that sort of limit on the president’s power to control the executive branch that he heads.

Currently, conservative justices (who form a majority in the Supreme Court) are split on whether there are limits on the president’s ability to hire and fire within the executive branch. Five of the six conservative justices have already held that limits on that power are very narrow. Two of those five — Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — have written that there should be effectively no limits at all. (The sixth conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, was not on the court in 2020 when this issue was last addressed.) Two of the three Left-leaning justices already said the Constitution does allow such protections without violating the separation of powers, and the third — Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was also not on the Court then — would probably join them.

Which is to say: Trump almost certainly has Thomas and Gorsuch in his corner and almost certainly will have Jackson, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor ruling against him. The remaining four — Barrett, Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts — will decide the case.

Part of Trump’s populist message was that no matter which party is in power, a bureaucracy controlled by entrenched interests works to maintain its own power and promote its own vision of where the country should go — even when that vision runs contrary to that of the people’s elected representatives. Firing civil servants who work against the elected officials who are supposed to be their bosses is crucial to the MAGA mission. If the Supreme Court prevents Trump from doing this, then a much bigger fight between the executive and judicial branch should be expected.