WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to remove Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel for now, in one of the most prominent legal challenges over presidential power to fire executive branch officials without cause.

The unanimous order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit paused a ruling over the weekend that would have permanently reinstated Dellinger as his lawsuit moves through the court system.

Wednesday’s unsigned order said Trump “satisfied the stringent requirements” to pause the opinion from Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“This order gives effect to the removal of appellee from his position as Special Counsel of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel,” an order states.

The D.C. Circuit panel adopted a quick schedule in the case, with both sides set to file briefs by the end of next month on whether a law unconstitutionally infringes on presidential authority because it puts job protections on the role.

Established in the 1970s, Congress created the Office of Special Counsel to shield federal workers from illegal practices and protect whistleblowers. The law creating the Senate-confirmed office also shielded the special counsel from being fired except for cause.

The Trump administration fired Dellinger last month, and the Biden appointee filed a lawsuit challenging the removal from his five-year term in the role. Jackson reinstated him soon after, saying the firing broke the law.

The case has already made it to the Supreme Court once, where Trump sought to have the justices intervene and let him fire Dellinger after Jackson first reinstated him. However, the justices sidestepped that effort and allowed Jackson to rule.

Over the weekend, Jackson issued an order finding that Trump’s firing of the special counsel violated the law. Jackson wrote that Dellinger’s role was “unlike any” other in the federal government, and that he does not dictate federal policy or control investigations.

“The Special Counsel is supposed to withstand the winds of political change and help ensure that no government servant of either party becomes the subject of prohibited employment practices or faces reprisals for calling out wrongdoing — by holdovers from a previous administration or by officials of the new one,” Jackson wrote.

The Trump administration has argued that the president is allowed to fire any official in the executive branch and has said it intends to challenge Supreme Court precedents that protect officials from being fired without cause.

The Dellinger case has emerged as a major inflection point in the Trump administration’s effort to remake the executive branch without approval from Congress. Beyond the ability to fire Dellinger, the Office of Special Counsel has a role in advocating for federal workers.

Dellinger, since being reinstated, has taken numerous actions protecting federal employees from Trump’s attempts to summarily dismiss them. On Wednesday, the Merit Systems Protection Board announced it had stayed for 45 days the firings of probationary employees at the Department of Agriculture.

The board’s notice said that Dellinger had requested it take up the cases of all of the thousands of probationary employees fired by the Trump administration without cause, and that the firings likely violating federal law mandating that they only be fired for performance reasons.

Last week, the board similarly ordered temporary reinstatement of half a dozen employees who were fired without cause by the Trump administration as part of mass termination letters that have been sent out across federal agencies.

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