The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Donald Trump sweeping authority to fire the leaders of independent federal agencies at will, ruling 6-3 along ideological lines and overturning Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the 1935 decision that for 91 years had let Congress shield certain officials from removal except for cause. The decision in Trump v. Slaughter reshapes the constitutional relationship between the president and the federal bureaucracy more decisively than any ruling in decades.
The case grew out of Trump's attempt early in his term to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, without citing the 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office' that the FTC's governing statute requires. Slaughter sued, arguing the removal protections Congress wrote into the law were valid under Humphrey's Executor. The Court disagreed, holding that those protections unconstitutionally infringe on the president's executive power.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Constitution vests executive power in the president alone and that 'the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust,' and cannot be 'saddled' with subordinates 'with whom he cannot work.' Of the precedent the Court was discarding, Roberts wrote pointedly: 'If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it.'
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented sharply. Sotomayor wrote that the majority 'discards' the Constitution's 'democratic regime' and creates 'a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before.' Kagan, in her own remarks, accused the majority of repealing Humphrey's Executor 'by fiat' and replacing a settled structure with a regime of presidential dominance.
Humphrey's Executor arose from President Franklin Roosevelt's effort to remove an FTC commissioner who disagreed with his policies. A unanimous Court in 1935 held that Congress could create agencies run by officials insulated from at-will removal, reasoning that bodies exercising quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions should be free of direct political control. That ruling became the cornerstone of the modern administrative state, underpinning the independence of agencies that regulate broadcasting, labor relations, consumer products, nuclear power and competition.
The practical reach of Monday's decision is broad. Legal analysts said it immediately calls into question the for-cause protections enjoyed by members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, among roughly two dozen multi-member agencies. Officials at those bodies can now, in principle, be removed by the president for any reason or none.
The majority drew one explicit line. It exempted the Federal Reserve, saying the central bank follows 'in the distinct historical tradition' of the early national banks that were not subject to plenary presidential control. In a separate 5-4 order issued the same day, the Court declined to let Trump immediately remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook, allowing her to keep her seat while litigation continues. Kagan called the Fed exception unprincipled, writing that the bank's independence 'rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations' as the agencies the Court had just stripped of protection.
The ruling hands Trump a tool to reshape agencies that have at times constrained his agenda, allowing him to install loyalists across the regulatory state without waiting for terms to expire. Supporters cast it as restoring democratic accountability, arguing that officials wielding executive power should answer to the elected president. Critics warned it removes a check designed to keep regulation insulated from partisan swings, and that the next several years will see a wave of removals and appointments testing just how far the new authority reaches.