WASHINGTON — Paul D. Clement, a lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court to defend the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the Trump administration refused, gave a timely example on Tuesday to illustrate why it can be a good idea for agencies to be insulated from politics.

“People are trying to make a political football out of dealing with a pandemic disease,” he said, referring to the coronavirus outbreak. A reasonable congressional response, he said, might be to make it harder to fire the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That is the kind of sensible decision that Congress has been making for over 100 years,” Mr. Clement said.

In the case before the justices, a challenge to the constitutionality of the consumer bureau’s leadership structure, the court’s conservative majority generally seemed open to setting limits on agencies’ independence.

The bureau is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, then a law professor at Harvard and now a Democratic senator and presidential candidate, and was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed in 2010 after the financial crisis. In an effort to protect the bureau from politics, the act said the president could remove its director only for cause, defined as “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance.”