The Supreme Court has expanded the president’s authority over independent agencies, ruling against former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, who was fired by President Donald Trump last year.
In a 6-3 ruling, the justices argued that at-will removal protections for members violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.
“The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive, in whom such power is vested. It follows, then, that Slaughter served as the President’s subordinate at the FTC—and that the President was entitled to cut her tenure short,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in the case of Trump v. Slaughter.
Trump fired Slaughter and another former Democratic FTC commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, in March 2025, writing in their termination letters that their “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”
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Slaughter and Bedoya sued the Trump administration for unlawful termination under the legislation creating the agency, which limits the reasons for the president’s removal of a commissioner to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Bedoya later removed himself as a plaintiff in the case to seek other work.
The decision in the Slaughter case overturns a seminal Supreme Court ruling for independent federal agencies, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which affirmed at-will removal protections for FTC commissioners and has since been cited in many legal opinions.
The government argued that today’s FTC is a far cry from the commission in the 1935 case because it now exercises executive powers, including the authority to investigate potential violations of federal law and adjudicate claims itself. That puts FTC commissioners more firmly under the president’s authority, Justice Department attorneys argued.
In an interview with NOTUS in February, Slaughter said Trump’s decision to terminate her threatened the ability of independent agency leaders to do their jobs free of political considerations and corrupt schemes to influence policy. It also usurps Congress’ constitutional powers over independent agencies.
“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.”
After the opinion came out, Slaughter said in a statement that “the consequences of this ruling will be felt by every American in both tangible and imperceptible ways.
“Today’s ruling makes it possible for presidents to fire watchdogs who won’t put politics over principle, and replace them with lapdogs,” she said. “It’s a recipe for corruption; working families will pay the price.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissenting opinion, wrote that the majority decision infringes on the constitutional powers of Congress, giving 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.”
Sotomayor added that the decision assumes the Court “knows better” than the founders of the agencies themselves on the question of removal.
A federal District Court judge sided with Slaughter in July last year, arguing that the FTC possessed those powers when the Supreme Court heard Humphrey’s Executor. The government appealed the District Court’s decision, eventually bringing the question of at-will removal protections before the Supreme Court once again.
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