The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that President Trump acted lawfully when he fired Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning a 90-year-old precedent that had shielded leaders of independent agencies from presidential removal. The decision in Trump v. Slaughter dismantles the legal framework erected by Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a framework that conservative legal analysts have long argued enabled an unaccountable administrative state to operate beyond the reach of any elected official.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, grounding the ruling squarely in Article II of the Constitution. The six-justice majority held that for-cause removal protections written into the Federal Trade Commission Act are incompatible with the executive power vested in the presidency. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The practical effect is sweeping. As Breitbart reported, the ruling potentially exposes leadership at dozens of independent agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board, to at-will presidential removal. For decades, Congress insulated these bodies from direct White House control. That insulation is now gone.
Trump fired Slaughter and fellow Democratic FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya in March of last year. The White House said their continued service was "inconsistent with [the] Administration's priorities." Slaughter, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sued under the FTC Act, which states the president may only remove commissioners for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."
A D.C. federal judge ruled she had been wrongly fired. A D.C. appeals court panel agreed. But the Supreme Court stayed both lower court decisions in September 2025, signaling where the majority was headed. This was not the first time the justices had intervened in Trump's removal of agency heads. As the Washington Examiner noted, the Court had previously sided with the administration in two similar cases involving independent agency firings.
Monday's ruling resolved the matter for good, and went further than many observers expected.
The majority opinion traced the constitutional argument back a full century. In 1926, the Court decided Myers v. United States, finding that the president alone holds the power to remove appointed officers. Nine years later, Humphrey's Executor carved out an exception for the FTC, reasoning that the agency exercised quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions rather than executive power.
Roberts made clear that whatever the FTC looked like in the 1930s, it bears no resemblance to that description today. During oral arguments, he observed that Humphrey's Executor concerned "an agency that had very little, if any, executive power", a far cry from the modern FTC's regulatory reach. He called the old precedent "just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was."
The written opinion was no gentler. Roberts wrote, as the New York Post reported:
"From the start, Humphrey's was tethered to a highly circumscribed and almost fictional view of the FTC's role."
He left no ambiguity about the precedent's fate:
"If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it."
The core constitutional logic was direct. Roberts wrote that officers "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 also stated that "neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work."
This reasoning aligns with an argument that has animated conservative legal thought for decades: that the Constitution's separation of powers means the president must be able to control the people who wield executive authority in his name. The alternative, agencies staffed by officials a president cannot fire, enforcing rules a president did not set, creates a government accountable to no one voters can reach.
The ruling arrives during a term in which the Court has handed Trump several significant victories, reinforcing executive authority on multiple fronts.
The majority did not declare open season on every independent body in Washington. Roberts explicitly left open the possibility that some entities "traditionally handled outside the Executive Branch" may fall outside the general removal rule. He pointed to one example by name: the Federal Reserve.
"And one example we have given of an entity that may have such a unique role is the Federal Reserve, 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."
That carveout carried immediate practical significance. The Court on the same day rejected a request to quash a lower court order blocking Trump's attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who faced allegations of mortgage fraud. The lower court order remains in place. Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were the only two justices in the majority for both the Cook and Slaughter cases, suggesting the rest of the Slaughter majority drew the line at the Fed.
The distinction matters. Monetary policy independence has long been treated as a separate category from regulatory enforcement. Roberts's opinion suggests the Court is willing to protect that tradition even while tearing down protections elsewhere. Whether that exception holds under future pressure remains an open question, and one that the Court's broader presidential-power docket may continue to test.
Justice Sotomayor did not mince words. She argued the majority had overturned a framework that "Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on" to build a functioning government. Her dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson, framed the decision as reckless revisionism.
"Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong."
She went further, characterizing the majority opinion as internally contradictory, sweeping in its theory of executive power yet riddled with undefined exceptions.
"Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all-encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions."
The Washington Times reported that Sotomayor also wrote that the ruling "gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted." That is a striking claim, but it sidesteps the constitutional text Roberts relied on. Article II vests executive power in the president. The question the Court answered Monday was whether Congress can override that text by statute. Six justices said it cannot.
Sotomayor's dissent raises a fair procedural concern: the ruling leaves unclear exactly which agencies might qualify for a Fed-style exception and which do not. But the dissent's broader argument, that the arrangement worked fine for 90 years, is not a constitutional defense. Plenty of unconstitutional practices persisted for decades before the Court corrected them.
The ruling's ripple effects extend well beyond the FTC. Just the News reported that the decision grants Trump broad authority to remove executive agency employees, striking down for-cause removal protections as unconstitutional. The Washington Times noted that the ruling gives tacit approval to dozens, potentially hundreds, of other Trump firings of Democratic appointees across agencies including the NLRB, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
That is a seismic shift. For decades, incoming presidents inherited agency leadership they could not remove. Commissioners appointed by a predecessor could serve out their terms, blocking policy changes the voters had endorsed at the ballot box. The result was a permanent bureaucratic class that answered to no one, not the president who inherited them, not the Congress that funded them, and certainly not the public that lived under their regulations.
Monday's ruling restores a basic principle: if you exercise executive power, you answer to the executive. And if the executive fails, voters can hold him accountable. That chain of accountability was broken by Humphrey's Executor. The Court has now repaired it.
The decision also arrives in a term where the Court has addressed multiple cases involving presidential authority and agency firings, underscoring how central executive power questions have become to the current legal landscape.
Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social, writing: "BIG WIN just moments ago at the Supreme Court, in the Slaughter Case, confirming Presidential Power in our Country to remove Executive Branch Officers and Agency Appointees, or Representatives, under Article II." He added that the decision "was long sought by United States Presidents, dating all the way back to the 1930s." In a subsequent post, he called it "the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years."
That characterization is not far off. Presidents from both parties have chafed under Humphrey's Executor for generations. The difference is that this administration actually fought the case, and won.
Several loose ends remain. The ruling addressed Slaughter's firing directly, but the status of Bedoya's case, whether it was folded into this decision or proceeds separately, is not entirely clear. The lower court order protecting Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook remains in effect, and the boundaries of the Fed exception Roberts outlined are undefined. Which agencies, if any, might claim similar protection? The opinion does not say.
The Court has also not addressed how the ruling interacts with agencies whose enabling statutes contain different types of removal restrictions. The FTC Act's "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance" standard was the specific target here. Whether other statutory frameworks survive will likely require additional litigation, and the Court's willingness to side with executive authority this term suggests those challenges will come quickly.
For now, the bottom line is plain. The Constitution says the president runs the executive branch. After 90 years, the Supreme Court agrees.
