The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that President Trump has the constitutional power to fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies at will, overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 precedent that had shielded agency commissioners from presidential removal for nearly nine decades.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, declaring that the Federal Trade Commission’s statutory “for cause” removal protection violates the separation of powers. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.
The decision resolves a legal fight that began when Trump fired Democratic-appointed FTC Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya at the start of his second term, invoking his Article II authority rather than the narrow statutory grounds, “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”, that the FTC’s governing statute had required since 1914. The ruling vindicates that action and strips similar protections from officials across the federal regulatory apparatus.
The majority opinion left little room for ambiguity. As the Washington Examiner reported, Roberts wrote that the FTC’s removal protections are “contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”
“Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President… he and he alone is vested with the executive Power of the United States.”
Roberts drove the point further, writing that officers who exercise executive power must remain accountable to the president, and accountability requires the ability to remove them. The majority concluded that Humphrey’s Executor had relied on a distinction between “quasi-legislative,” “quasi-judicial,” and executive functions that, in Roberts’s framing, “never made sense” and had become “increasingly untenable” as agencies like the FTC expanded their powers far beyond the narrow role they occupied in 1935.
National Review’s Ed Whelan noted Roberts’s pointed language: the FTC’s activities “fall well within the heartland of executive power,” with “no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.”
The majority opinion, as quoted by multiple outlets, stated plainly:
“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.”
That line, drawn from the Court’s opinion as reported by Just the News, captures the core constitutional logic: the president’s executive power is not divisible, and Congress cannot parcel it out to officials insulated from his control.
Humphrey’s Executor had carved out an exception to the president’s removal authority for agencies that Congress deemed to exercise quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, a category the 1935 Court created largely to protect the FTC from Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a commissioner whose policy views he opposed. For nearly ninety years, that exception underpinned the modern regulatory framework, shielding the leadership of dozens of independent agencies from presidential removal.
But the constitutional theory behind the exception eroded steadily. The FTC of 2026 bears little resemblance to the small commission the 1935 Court described. Its enforcement powers, rulemaking authority, and adjudicative reach have expanded enormously, making the “quasi” label an increasingly poor fit.
During oral arguments earlier this term, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Court to overturn Humphrey’s Executor outright, calling it an “indefensible outlier” and a “decaying husk,” as Fox News reported. Justice Neil Gorsuch signaled agreement during those arguments, suggesting the 1935 decision was perhaps “a recognition that Humphrey’s Executor was poorly reasoned, and that there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”
Monday’s ruling confirmed that view. The Court did not merely narrow the precedent. It overturned it.
The logic of the decision extends well beyond the FTC. The SEC, CFTC, NLRB, and potentially dozens of other independent agencies with similar for-cause removal protections now face the prospect that their leaders serve at the president’s pleasure. National Review’s analysis noted that the ruling’s reasoning applies to nearly all independent agencies exercising executive power, including the FCC and FEC.
The Court, however, appeared to draw a line at the Federal Reserve. The majority indicated that the Fed “may occupy a different constitutional category” because of its unique historical lineage, tracing back to the First and Second Banks of the United States. That distinction matters. It suggests the justices were unwilling to hand any president a blank check to reshape monetary policy by firing Fed governors at will.
The Court’s caution on the Fed was reinforced by a companion decision issued the same day. In a separate 5-4 ruling, the justices rejected Trump’s bid to stay a lower court order that allowed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in her position while litigation over her removal continues. The narrow majority held that “for cause” protection of Fed governors “is consistent with the Constitution and the history of central bank independence in the U.S.” The Court also found that the president had failed to provide Cook with required notice and a fair opportunity to respond to allegations against her.
The companion ruling is notable for its tighter margin, 5-4 rather than 6-3, suggesting at least one justice in the Trump v. Slaughter majority was unwilling to extend the same reasoning to the central bank. The specific composition of the majority and dissent in the Cook case was not disclosed in available reporting.
For decades, the independence of federal regulatory agencies rested on a legal fiction: that commissioners exercising vast enforcement and rulemaking powers were somehow not exercising “executive” authority. That fiction allowed Congress to create a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus whose leaders answered to no elected official, not to the president who nominates them, and certainly not to the voters who elected that president.
Monday’s ruling dismantles that arrangement. The practical effect is that the president can now remove the heads of agencies like the FTC, SEC, and NLRB without demonstrating cause. Officials who once enjoyed tenure protections now serve at the pleasure of the chief executive.
This is a significant shift, and it will draw fierce opposition. Critics will argue that it politicizes agencies that are supposed to regulate impartially. But the constitutional question was never whether independent agencies are a good idea as a policy matter. The question was whether Congress has the power to strip the president of control over officials who wield his executive authority. Six justices said it does not.
The ruling arrives during a period of sustained legal confrontation between the Trump administration and the judiciary. The Supreme Court has delivered multiple significant wins for the administration in recent terms, including on asylum and deportation policy.
At the same time, the administration has faced setbacks in lower courts on other executive actions. A D.C. Circuit ruling blocking Trump’s policy on transgender troops illustrated how contested executive authority remains across multiple fronts.
Monday’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter is the most consequential of these battles. It does not merely resolve one dispute over two fired FTC commissioners. It restructures the relationship between the presidency and the regulatory state.
The Court’s current conservative majority has shown a willingness to revisit long-standing precedents when the constitutional text demands it. Monday’s ruling fits that pattern.
Several important questions remain unanswered. The ruling’s immediate procedural effect on Slaughter and Bedoya, whether their removal is now final or requires further action, is not yet clear. The precise scope of the decision’s impact on every multi-member commission has not been fully mapped. And the Federal Reserve carve-out, while suggested by the majority, has not been fully defined. Does it cover only the Board of Governors, or does it extend to Federal Reserve Bank presidents?
The basis of the three-justice dissent also remains to be examined in full. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented, but the substance of their objections has not been widely reported beyond their opposition.
What is clear is the direction. The era of agency heads who could defy a president while claiming the protection of a ninety-year-old precedent built on a constitutional fiction is over. The Trump administration pressed this fight knowing the stakes, and the Court agreed that the Constitution means what it says.
Accountability runs upward to the president, and through him, to the voters. That is not a radical proposition. It is the original design.
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