The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to remove three members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for now, the latest instance in which the conservative court has backed an emergency appeal from the administration.

The court’s three liberal members dissented from the decision.

In a brief, unsigned order, the court said that it was bound to follow an earlier decision it made that allowed Trump to remove for now two top officials at independent federal labor agencies while legal challenges played out.

“The Consumer Product Safety Commission exercises executive power in a similar manner as the National Labor Relations Board, and the case does not otherwise differ from Wilcox in any pertinent respect,” the court said in its order.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan, writing for her two colleagues on the left, said the court was destroying “the independence of an independent agency,” and was taking a piecemeal approach to giving the president more power.

“The majority has acted on the emergency docket—with ‘little time, scant briefing, and no argument’ — to override Congress’s decisions about how to structure administrative agencies so that they can perform their prescribed duties,” she wrote. “By means of such actions, this Court may facilitate the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”

Trump dismissed the three board members in May, but a federal district court last month ordered their reinstatement. The administration asked the Supreme Court to pause that lower court order, a move that would take those three commissioners off the board once again.

Like other emergency cases that have come before the Supreme Court since Trump’s return to power, the central question is about how much control a president has over independent agencies whose leadership is supposed to be free from the political whims of the White House.

The three board members involved in the case – Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr. – were appointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate.

The court has been receptive to Trump’s arguments on the point in earlier cases, giving his administration far more control over those agencies – at least in the short term.

In May, the court allowed Trump to fire officials on two independent federal labor agencies that enforce worker protections.

“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the president,” the court wrote in its unsigned opinion at the time, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.”

Writing for the dissenting justices, Kagan said the majority seemed to have effectively overruled a decades-old Supreme Court case, Humphrey’s Executor v. US, that allowed Congress to require presidents to show cause – such as malfeasance – before dismissing board members overseeing independent agencies.

“For 90 years, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States has stood as a precedent of this court,” Kagan wrote in dissent. “Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law.”

But the Department of Justice read the court’s decision in the labor cases to do exactly that, and it argued the decision should control what happens with the consumer product board as well.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, created in the 1970s, is charged with protecting consumers from dangerous products by issuing recalls and taking other enforcement steps. Its five board members serve staggered, seven-year terms and by law can be removed only “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

But the Supreme Court has increasingly voiced skepticism about the constitutionality of such requirements.

Five years ago, the court’s conservatives held that those kinds of protections for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau violated separation of powers principles. The president’s power to “remove – and thus supervise – those who wield executive power” flows directly from the Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. But the court’s decision nevertheless appeared to leave the Humphrey’s precedent intact.

A federal district court ordered the three consumer product board members to be reinstated, and they were. The Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected Trump’s request to block that decision. In a concurring opinion, US Circuit Judge James Wynn noted that the Supreme Court had not yet technically overturned Humphrey’s.

“That precedent remains binding on this court unless and until the Supreme Court overrules it,” wrote Wynn, who was nominated to the bench by former President Barack Obama.

This story has been updated with additional developments.