The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday to strike down the federal law that shielded members of the Federal Trade Commission from presidential removal, overturning a 91-year-old precedent and handing the executive branch its broadest new authority over independent agencies in nearly a century.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that FTC commissioners exercise executive power and must therefore answer to the president, full stop. The decision in Trump v. Slaughter overrules Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the 1935 case that had long insulated commissioners at dozens of multi-member agencies from at-will removal, as SCOTUSblog reported.
For readers who believe the Constitution means what it says, that executive power belongs to the president, Monday's ruling is a long-overdue correction. For the three liberal justices who dissented, it marks nothing less than a restructuring of the federal government. Both sides may be right.
The dispute began when the White House sent FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter a letter notifying her she had been "removed from the Federal Trade Commission, effective immediately." The letter did not cite the statutory grounds, "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office", that the old law required. Instead, it said allowing Slaughter to remain would be "inconsistent with my Administration's priorities."
Slaughter's backstory made the case unusual. Trump himself nominated her during his first term to fill a Democratic seat on the five-member commission. President Biden then renominated her in 2023 for a second term. When the removal letter arrived, Slaughter filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Judge Loren AliKhan ordered the administration to reinstate her. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit, Judges Patricia Millett and Nina Pillard, declined to pause that order, reasoning that only the Supreme Court could overturn Humphrey's Executor, which they called "controlling."
The administration then went directly to the Supreme Court, which granted the government's application to freeze AliKhan's reinstatement order and set the case for oral argument in December. Justice Kagan dissented from that freeze, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
Monday's ruling resolved the matter for good, and went far beyond Slaughter's individual case.
Roberts's 36-page majority opinion dismantled Humphrey's Executor piece by piece. The 1935 decision, he wrote, "was tethered to a highly circumscribed and almost fictional view of the FTC's role", one that described the agency as "neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative."
That fiction, Roberts argued, has not survived contact with reality. The modern FTC "enforces and administers some 80 statutes, which cover almost every facet of our Nation's economy." It conducts investigations, enforces compliance "through in-house adjudications," and "files civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court." As Roberts put it, quoting prior case law, the "discretionary power to seek judicial relief" sits "at the very core of executive authority."
The conclusion followed directly. As the Washington Examiner reported, Roberts grounded the decision squarely in constitutional structure: "Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President... he and he alone is vested with the executive Power of the United States."
Roberts then delivered the core holding in language that left little room for ambiguity:
"The President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."
The opinion declared that "Slaughter served as the President's subordinate at the FTC, and... the President was entitled to cut her tenure short."
This ruling fits a pattern. The Court recently backed the administration 8-1 in a separate case involving FCC enforcement power, and the justices have shown increasing willingness to revisit the boundaries of executive authority.
Roberts was careful to mark limits. He noted that "not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive or even sovereign power attached," citing the Boy Scouts of America and Georgetown University as examples of congressionally chartered entities that fall outside the executive branch.
More significantly, Roberts flagged the Federal Reserve. He wrote that the Fed may occupy a different constitutional space "to the extent that it follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States, both of which influenced monetary policy and neither of which were subject to plenary Presidential control." The Court, he said, was not resolving "the fate of officials not before us."
That carve-out matters. National Review noted that in an earlier emergency order involving the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, the Court had already explicitly called the Federal Reserve "a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity."
Still, Roberts framed the holding broadly: "All we do today is recognize what has been clear for a century, that those who fall within the President's 'general administrative control' must be removable by the President at will."
Justice Sotomayor did not hold back. Her dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson, ran 49 pages, longer than the majority opinion itself. She accused the Court of discarding the constitutional order "in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority's theory of unitary, total executive control."
"The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before."
Sotomayor argued that Congress created multi-member agencies like the FTC "to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control." She warned that Monday's decision "reshapes our Government" and predicted that "dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands."
She named names: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Each, she argued, would lose its statutory independence under the majority's reasoning.
The dissent's sharpest line accused the majority of giving "the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws."
That is a dramatic claim. But the majority opinion points in the opposite direction, toward a president who can finally be held accountable for the actions of the agencies that exercise his constitutional power. Justice Jackson has previously taken her frustrations with conservative colleagues public, and the tenor of this dissent suggests the liberal wing views the current trajectory with alarm.
The practical consequences are significant. For roughly two dozen multi-member agencies, the statutory removal protections that have defined their structure since the New Deal era are now constitutionally suspect. Any agency whose commissioners exercise executive power, which, after Monday, plainly includes enforcement, rulemaking, and litigation on behalf of the United States, falls under the president's removal authority.
That means the president can fire commissioners who obstruct his policy agenda, not just those guilty of neglect or malfeasance. The old standard required a showing of cause. The new standard requires nothing beyond the president's judgment that a subordinate is not the right person for the job.
The ruling also resolves a series of legal battles that had been working through lower courts since Trump returned to office. The administration had already moved to remove officials at the NLRB and MSPB, and the Supreme Court had intervened on an emergency basis twice before elevating Slaughter's case to the full merits docket.
For those who have watched unelected commissioners at alphabet-soup agencies wield enormous power over the American economy with minimal accountability, the ruling restores a basic constitutional principle: if you exercise the president's power, the president can fire you.
The relationship between this administration and the Court has been closely watched. Trump made history earlier this term by appearing personally before the justices in the birthright citizenship case, and the Court has not hesitated to rule against the administration when it finds the legal footing weak.
Sotomayor's dissent raises a fair concern about concentration of power. But it never grapples with the mirror-image problem: What happens when unelected commissioners, insulated from removal, pursue agendas that no voter chose and no president can stop?
The FTC alone enforces roughly 80 statutes touching "almost every facet of our Nation's economy," in Roberts's words. Its commissioners serve seven-year terms, staggered to outlast any single president. Under the old regime, a president could inherit a commission stacked with political opponents and have no recourse, even when those commissioners used their power to advance policies the electorate had rejected at the ballot box.
That is not a feature of democratic accountability. It is a bug. And for 91 years, Humphrey's Executor treated that bug as constitutional bedrock.
Monday's ruling does not make the president a king. It makes him responsible. Some officials have already shown a willingness to defy Supreme Court rulings they dislike, and the real test will be whether Congress and the executive branch adapt to the new framework or spend the next decade relitigating it.
Several important issues remain unresolved. The ruling does not specify whether all two dozen-plus independent commissions are immediately affected or whether each will require separate litigation. The Federal Reserve's status is explicitly left open. And the fate of officials who exercise functions Roberts described as falling outside the executive branch, including non-lifetime-tenured federal judges, awaits future cases.
What is clear is that the constitutional architecture of the administrative state just shifted. The question going forward is not whether the president can fire his own subordinates. After Monday, the answer is yes. The question is whether Washington's permanent bureaucratic class will accept it.
For 91 years, a legal fiction shielded unelected regulators from the only person voters can actually hold accountable. The Court finally called it what it was, and ended it.
