The Supreme Court on Friday dashed President Donald Trump’s plan to immediately fire the head of an independent agency that investigates whistleblower claims, allowing Hampton Dellinger to remain in the job through at least the middle of next week.

By declining to back Trump’s emergency appeal, the conservative court nominally sided with Dellinger, who President Joe Biden appointed in 2024 to lead the Office of Special Counsel for a five-year term but who White House officials fired in a brief email days after Trump returned to power.

The Dellinger appeal was the first to reach the Supreme Court tied to Trump’s whirlwind of activity since returning to the White House last month. A flood of litigation over executive actions, immigration, other firings and Elon Musk’s work for the government are simultaneously making their way through lower courts.

In an unsigned order, the court said it would hold the case on pause until February 26, when a temporary order handed down by a lower court is set to expire. A district court hearing is scheduled to consider whether to extend the pause on Dellinger’s dismissal.

But the order also left unresolved all of the questions posed by the case, meaning the fight will likely be back at the court in short order. Four justices – two liberals and two conservatives – dissented from the decision.

Pending before the justices was a technical question about whether a temporary order from a lower court that paused Dellinger’s dismissal for a few weeks should be blocked. But the court’s decision failed to resolve that question, essentially punting. If the lower court issues a preliminary injunction after that hearing, the Department of Justice could then appeal that ruling back up to the Supreme Court.

“The best explanation for why a majority of the justices opted to put off a ruling in this case for now is because of a concern that they’d otherwise open the floodgates to dozens of emergency requests when all that the lower courts had entered were time-limited temporary restraining orders,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

“This way, the court avoids endorsing that procedural move, while preserving the ability to resolve whether Dellinger should or should not be allowed to stay in his job as soon as the middle of next week,” he said.

Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented from the decision, asserting in a short opinion that the district court overstepped. Gorsuch said he would have ordered the district court to revisit its temporary order.

“The district court grappled with none” of the history and law surrounding similar cases in the past before ordering Dellinger to be reinstated, Gorsuch wrote. “If there are answers to the questions … they appear nowhere in the court’s decision.”

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have denied the government’s emergency request, but they did not explain their position.

“I am glad to be able to continue my work as an independent government watchdog and whistleblower advocate,” Dellinger said in a statement after the ruling. “I am grateful to the judges and justices who have concluded that I should be allowed to remain on the job while the courts decide whether my office can retain a measure of independence from direct partisan and political control.”

Simmering below the surface of the case are more fundamental questions about Trump’s power to fire potential critics who enjoy for-cause removal protections in federal law. For now, those questions will remain unanswered. But they will almost certainly wind their way back to the court in the coming weeks.

The Office of Special Counsel is unrelated to special counsels like Jack Smith or Robert Mueller who are appointed to oversee politically sensitive Justice Department investigations. Instead, Dellinger handles allegations of whistleblower retaliation made on behalf of federal employees – including some who are also losing their jobs as Trump attempts to rapidly shrink the size of the executive branch. Created during the Carter administration, Congress made clear that the special counsel could be removed “by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office fired Dellinger on February 7 in a brief email that cited none of those for-cause requirements, court records show.

The litigation could have far-reaching implications for Trump’s ability to control independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. A group of law professors urged the Supreme Court in a brief Tuesday to insulate the Federal Reserve from whatever decision they make in Dellinger’s case, warning of the potential for “highly undesirable implications and consequences for the economy.”

Congress has granted several agencies a degree of independence so they can make decisions without being pressured by the White House. During his first term, Trump repeatedly leaned on the Federal Reserve to set lower interest rates, for instance. A lower rate can bump stock prices and make it cheaper for people to borrow money, often giving a boost to a president’s favorability. But lowering interest rates can also fuel higher inflation.

The board largely ignored Trump. If the president gets his way, he could simply remove board members and install replacements who will carry out his wishes.

In Dellinger’s case, a federal district court issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump from enforcing the dismissal for a few weeks to give the court time to consider the case. Such temporary orders are, generally, not appealable. But the Justice Department under Trump appealed anyway, arguing that federal courts had committed an “unprecedented assault on the separation of powers” with the order.

In a 2-1 decision over the weekend, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit said the temporary order was not appealable. The two judges in the majority in that decision were appointed by former President Joe Biden. A third judge, appointed by Trump, said he would have granted the government’s request to block the temporary order.

This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

CNN’s Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.