On Monday, President Donald Trump moved to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden-nominated member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. He moved to fire Cook for “cause,” and that cause is clear enough: According to William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Cook allegedly committed mortgage fraud by lying about her principal place of residence for purposes of securing more favorable interest rates — and then failed to report her rental income from the properties, to boot.

Trump’s move is the first time a president has ever tried to fire a Fed governor for cause, and Trump’s usual detractors have criticized him for his latest perceived violation of institutional norms. But Trump has acted appropriately; he is fully within his constitutional and statutorily delegated authority to remove Cook — whether for “cause” or not.

Let’s return to first principles. The modern administrative state operates as a fourth branch of government, unmoored from direct political accountability. Its very existence, to say nothing of its present metastasis, is in irreconcilable tension with the American Founders’ vision of a clearly delineated tripartite separation of powers between Congress, executive branch and judiciary.

Article II of the Constitution vests the entirety of the “executive power” in the hands of the president of the United States. And as Chief Justice William Howard Taft (himself a former president) made clear in Myers v. United States (1926), this includes the power to remove executive branch officers.

It is true that in Trump v. Wilcox, a case from earlier this year in which the court green-lit Trump’s dismissal of a Biden-nominated member of the National Labor Relations Board, the court did opine that arguments about the legitimacy of for-cause removal provisions for labor board members do not necessarily implicate similar for-cause restrictions for members of the Fed’s Board of Governors. The court’s brief two-page order in Wilcox described the Fed as a “uniquely structured … entity.”

But is it? Or perhaps more precisely, can it be?