The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that President Trump lawfully fired Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, overturning the 1935 precedent that for nine decades shielded independent agency leaders from presidential removal. The decision in the Slaughter case marks the most significant expansion of executive authority over the federal bureaucracy in modern history.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion for the conservative bloc, writing that if "anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it." The line was blunt and final, a direct repudiation of Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the New Deal-era ruling that allowed Congress to insulate agency heads from a president's firing power.
The ruling lands squarely on the question that has defined the Trump administration's confrontation with the administrative state: Does the president control the people who exercise executive power on his behalf? Six justices said yes.
The case centered on Slaughter, a Democratic appointee whom Trump originally placed on the FTC in 2018. Former President Biden later renominated her for a new term set to expire in 2029. Trump fired her last year.
Under the old Humphrey's Executor framework, that firing would have been illegal. The 1935 ruling held that Congress could restrict a president from removing heads of agencies with "quasi-judicial" and "quasi-legislative" functions, a carve-out that spawned the modern independent regulatory apparatus.
That framework is now gone. Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that officers who exercise executive power must remain accountable to the president, and that accountability requires the ability to remove them at will. As the New York Post reported, Roberts stated plainly: "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."
That is not an abstract legal principle. It is a direct assertion that the Constitution does not permit Congress to build agencies the president cannot manage.
The roots of Monday's ruling stretch back to the Roosevelt administration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired FTC Commissioner William Humphrey, a Calvin Coolidge appointee, for disagreeing with the New Deal agenda. The Supreme Court ruled against FDR in 1935, holding that Congress could shield certain agency officials from at-will removal.
That decision became the legal foundation for the modern regulatory state. Agencies like the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board all operated under the assumption that their leaders served fixed terms and could not be dismissed simply because a president disagreed with their direction.
Trump called the ruling a long-overdue correction. In a post on Truth Social, he wrote:
"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. This Decision was long sought by United States Presidents, dating all the way back to the 1930s."
He added that it was "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."
The president's framing is not wrong on the history. Every president since FDR has chafed, to some degree, under the constraints Humphrey's Executor imposed. What changed is that this administration was willing to force the issue, and this Court was willing to resolve it.
The ruling's reach extends well beyond the FTC. It is expected to affect roughly two dozen multimember agencies across the federal government. Breitbart reported that the decision potentially exposes leadership at agencies including the SEC, CFTC, and NLRB to at-will presidential removal, a fundamental shift in how those bodies operate.
The Court did, however, carve out one notable exception. Multiple reports confirmed that the majority explicitly stated the ruling does not apply to the Federal Reserve. National Review noted that the Court described the Fed as "a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity," signaling that its independence rests on different legal footing.
That carve-out matters for markets and for the political debate. Critics of expanded presidential removal power have warned that a president could use it to politicize monetary policy. The Court preempted that argument directly.
The ruling also builds on the Court's earlier action this term in Trump v. Wilcox, where an 8-1 decision granted an emergency stay allowing Trump to remove members of the NLRB and the Merit Systems Protection Board. That earlier order foreshadowed Monday's full-throated rejection of Humphrey's Executor. The majority wrote in Wilcox that "because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf."
Monday's ruling is part of a broader streak of Supreme Court decisions that have favored the Trump administration's legal positions. The Court has cleared the way for Trump to end Haitian TPS protections, drawing sharp criticism from congressional Democrats who accused the justices of enabling the administration's immigration agenda.
In another significant case, the Court ruled that asylum seekers in Mexico have not legally arrived in the United States, handing the administration another tool to manage the border crisis.
Not every case has gone Trump's way. The Court has appeared skeptical of the administration's executive order on birthright citizenship, suggesting the justices are applying constitutional principles rather than simply rubber-stamping White House priorities.
But the overall trajectory is unmistakable. Justice Sotomayor has publicly complained about the administration's use of emergency Supreme Court appeals, even as the Court keeps ruling in Trump's favor on the merits.
For decades, the for-cause removal standard meant that a president could only fire an independent agency head for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." That standard allowed agency leaders to pursue regulatory agendas that diverged from, or even contradicted, the priorities of the elected president who nominally oversaw them.
The practical result was a sprawling administrative state that operated with significant autonomy from the White House. Agency commissioners could outlast the presidents who appointed them, pursuing policies rooted in the preferences of a prior administration or of the permanent bureaucratic class.
Monday's ruling collapses that arrangement. If a president can remove agency heads at will, those officials must either align with the president's agenda or be replaced by someone who will. The accountability runs in one direction: from the agency to the president, and from the president to the voters.
That is exactly how Article II of the Constitution was designed to work. The Founders vested executive power in a single president, not in a constellation of semi-autonomous boards insulated from democratic accountability.
Newsmax reported that the ruling validates the "unitary executive" theory embraced by the Trump administration, which holds that all executive power flows from the president and that subordinate officers serve at his pleasure.
There is a certain symmetry to the fact that the FTC sits at the heart of both the rise and fall of Humphrey's Executor. It was an FTC commissioner's firing by FDR that created the precedent in 1935. And it was an FTC commissioner's firing by Trump that destroyed it in 2026.
The Court's packed June docket included several other major decisions on executive power, immigration, and elections, but the Slaughter case may prove the most consequential of the term for the long-term structure of the federal government.
Several questions remain unanswered. The identities and reasoning of the three dissenting justices were not detailed in initial reports. Whether the majority opinion carves out any additional exceptions beyond the Federal Reserve is unclear. And the full downstream effects on the roughly two dozen affected agencies will take months, perhaps years, to play out.
What is clear is that the constitutional principle at stake was never complicated. The president is elected. Agency heads are not. When unelected officials exercise executive power without answering to the person the voters chose, something has gone wrong with the design.
For 91 years, Humphrey's Executor papered over that problem with a legal fiction, the idea that certain government functions were "quasi-legislative" or "quasi-judicial" and therefore beyond the president's reach. Six justices looked at that fiction on Monday and called it what it was.
The administrative state just lost its favorite shield. Now the people who run these agencies will have to answer to someone who answers to the voters. That's not a power grab. That's the Constitution working as intended.
