Elon Musk's SpaceX sues US agency, claiming that its in-house courts are unconstitutional

Attorneys for Elon Musk's technology company SpaceX filed a lawsuit alleging that the National Labor Relations Board’s in-house courts are unconstitutional.

The complaint was filed on Thursday in the southern district of Texas and is reliant on a pending case titled Jarkesy v. SEC., which is set to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In that case, the plaintiff alleges that agency tribunals violate constitutional rights to a jury trial in civil cases. It argues that in administrative law, judges who are utilized by the NLRB and other different government agencies violate the constitution’s separation of powers.

“The NLRB’s current way of functioning is miles away from the traditional understanding of the separation of powers,” the SpaceX filing states, according to Politico. 

The filing also quotes a Federalist Paper by former President James Madison and states that the NLRB has a structure that is comparable to “the very definition of tyranny.”

This lawsuit comes shortly after NLRB prosecutors filed a complaint against SpaceX, which accused the company of illegally firing eight employees who had criticized Musk in 2022 in a circulated letter “for issuing inappropriate, disparaging, sexually charged comments on Twitter,” according to their lawyers. 

SpaceX is currently seeking an injunction against the government agency. 

“If the current Members of the NLRB are asked to make a prosecutorial determination about whether SpaceX is in violation of the NLRA, there is an objectively high risk that they would not later be able to provide the neutral adjudicative forum that the Constitution demands, and so would need to recuse from further participation in any agency adjudication against SpaceX,” the company’s attorneys wrote, according to Politico.