Supreme Court rules Trump can fire leaders of independent agencies, overturning precedent
The Supreme Court struck down a federal law that restricts the president’s ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding presidential control over independent federal agencies.
The court’s conservative majority voted 6-3 to uphold President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission who was removed from her position, along with another Democratic member, because he said their views didn’t align with his agenda.
“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,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.”
The ruling overturns a unanimous 90-year-old decision known as Humphrey’s Executor that has limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision making free of political influence — or leave it with only its shell intact. The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — dissented.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, adding, “the Court gives 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.”
The logic of the decision extends to other agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump also has fired board members. However, the justices carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve, where it ruled Trump did not have authority to remove Lisa Cook from the central bank.
Trump voiced his approval in a Truth Social post. “It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers,” he wrote.
In the Slaughter case, Trump fired her without cause, despite a provision of federal law that says presidents can only remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Slaughter sued and lower courts ordered her reinstated because the law allows commissioners to be removed only for problems like misconduct or neglect of duty. Chief Justice Roberts halted those decisions in a brief order, responding to an appeal from the Trump administration on the court’s emergency docket. The order allowed Slaughter and the board members of other agencies to be removed from their jobs even as their legal challenges continued.
The Justice Department argued that the FTC and other executive branch agencies are under Trump’s control and the Republican president is free to remove commissioners without cause. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued the case before the high court, called on the justices to jettison Humphrey’s Executor.
Sauer said the decision “hasn’t withstood the test of time” and had enabled a “headless fourth branch” of government, the administrative state that conservatives and business interests have been taking aim at for decades.
No president before Trump had sought to wrest control of the agencies that regulate wide swaths of American life, including nuclear energy, product safety and labor relations. But at arguments in Slaughter’s case in December, the six conservatives, including three appointed by Trump, seemed more concerned about issuing a ruling that would endure than handing too much power to Trump.
Their rhetoric was reminiscent of the presidential immunity case in 2024 that allowed Trump to avoid prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The court is writing a decision “for the ages,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said then.
From breaking news and local politics to art exhibitions, live music, high school sports, small businesses, and cultural events, we celebrate the people and places that make Connecticut unique.