Rebecca Slaughter is at the center of a Supreme Court battle that could redefine a president’s power over independent agencies. But the government branch with the most skin in the fight, she says, is the one that’s not involved in her lawsuit: Congress.
“There is an imperative for this Congress to reassert its constitutional role,” Slaughter, who President Donald Trump fired from the Federal Trade Commission in March 2025, said. “Congress has a lot of power over not just executive branch agencies, but also independent agencies that it is currently not exercising.”
In an interview with NOTUS, Slaughter made the case that the most important power struggle underlying her case is the one between Congress and the presidency.
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For decades, Congress has slowly ceded its authority to the presidency. That conflict is playing out today in doomed tariffs and war powers resolutions, as well as inaction on the Trump administration’s moves to unilaterally block congressionally-appropriated funds.
“People try to frame my case sometimes as the power of a bureaucrat versus the power of the president, and I really don’t think that’s what it is. It’s the power of Congress versus the power of the president,” Slaughter said.
“This is not about me or my job. I could happily move on with my life. This is really about how the institutions of government are structured and whether they are going to be accountable to Congress, to the American people, or operated entirely at the whims of the president,” she added.
Trump fired Slaughter and former Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya in March, arguing in their termination letters that their “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.”
Slaughter and Bedoya sued in March. Bedoya later removed himself as a plaintiff to seek other work.
In her view, their firing is a mark of a larger constitutional issue.
“I’m just a public servant who wants to do the job that she took an oath to do,” Slaughter said. “If one branch is acting without checks from the other two, that is a breakdown of the constitutional order that we are supposed to have.”
Slaughter’s case argues that the firing violates two bodies of law. Under the legislation creating the antitrust enforcement agency, Congress limited the reasons for which the president may remove an FTC commissioner to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The Supreme Court affirmed that the president cannot remove FTC commissioners “at will” in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 case that the Court may now overturn.
That’s why it’s Congress’s constitutional powers to create and structure federal agencies independent from the presidency that are at stake, Slaughter said.
“I don’t think we can assume Congress would have empowered the same agencies the same way if all of their leadership were directly removable by the president at will,” she added.
The government argues that the FTC the court considered in Humphrey’s Executor 90 years ago is not the FTC at issue today. The commission now wields substantial executive powers it didn’t have in the 20th century, such as investigating potential violations of federal law, seeking federal injunctions and monetary relief, and issuing rules and regulations against unfair business practices.
In July, Judge Loren AliKhan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with Slaughter, saying that the commissioner’s firing violated her protections from at-will removal.
“Because those protections remain constitutional, as they have for almost a century, Ms. Slaughter’s purported removal was unlawful and without legal effect,” AliKhan wrote.
For her part, Slaughter said seeking vast presidential powers to fire the commissioners of independent agencies is short sighted. In Humphrey’s Executor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired a conservative commissioner who the president said was an impediment to the progressive New Deal agenda.
If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.
“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said.
The outcome of her case may transform the workings of agencies and commissions beyond the FTC.
Senate confirmed political appointees across the executive branch are insulated from at-will employment to prevent corrupt schemes to land a favor or influence policy, Slaughter said. “You are incentivized to find unanimity, find consensus, and to give your decisions durability and stability. And if you can find it, you are checked by the power of transparency and accountability that is provided for in dissents and in alternate opinions,” Slaughter said.
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