On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential separation-of-powers rulings in decades. In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6-3 majority ruled that Congress cannot shield members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from being fired by the President at will. The Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had protected the independence of the FTC and dozens of other federal agencies for 91 years.
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Background
Created in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission is run by five commissioners rather than a single administrator. Under its governing statute, the Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 41-58 (“FTCA”), commissioners are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to seven-year terms, and by statute, no more than three of the five can belong to the same political party. Congress also set a limit on the president’s power to fire a commissioner. Removal was permitted only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.
The case began in March 2025, when President Trump fired two Federal Trade Commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without citing any of the grounds that allow him to do so under the FTCA. The two were told their continued presence on the commission did not fit with the administration’s agenda, and that the President was relying on his general constitutional authority over the executive branch, rather than any of the specific statutory grounds, for removing a commissioner. Bedoya later dropped out of the litigation, leaving Slaughter as the sole plaintiff.
Slaughter sued in D.C federal court, arguing that her removal was unlawful, and the district judge sided with her, and ordered her reinstated. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit refused to pause that order, citing Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The administration then went directly to the Supreme Court, which stayed the reinstatement and agreed to hear the case.
Humphrey’s Executor
To understand this case, it helps to know the story behind the precedent it overturned. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States arose from a similar dispute. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt fired Federal Trade Commissioner William Humphrey after he refused to resign, without citing any statutory ground. Humphrey died while his suit was pending, and his executor carried the case to the Supreme Court seeking back pay.
The Decision
Writing for a 6-3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that protecting FTC commissioners from removal except for cause conflicts with the constitutional separation of powers, and the Court struck down the statute and overturned Humphrey’s Executor. The opinion argued that the 1935 ruling had rested on a narrow and unrealistic picture of the agency, one that cast its work as mostly advisory to Congress and the courts rather than as the exercise of real governing power. That framing, the majority contended, does not match an agency that today writes rules that carry the law across most of the economy, investigates companies, resolves cases through its own internal proceedings, and sues on the government’s behalf in federal court. The majority anchored its holding in the Constitution’s Vesting Clause and Take Care Clause, which Chief Justice Roberts read as requiring that the President have unfettered control over any officer executing the laws. Because those are core executive functions, the Court reasoned, the commissioners who run the FTC are effectively the president’s subordinates, and the President is entitled to remove them at will.
Justice Sotomayor, joined by justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented, arguing that the ruling hands the Presidency more unchecked authority than even the monarchy the country’s founders rejected, and predicting that a large share of the government’s independent commissions will effectively become ordinary executive agencies as a result.
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The immediate impact of the decision is straightforward. Slaughter’s firing stands, and the FTC’s for-cause removal protection is gone. The larger significance lies in the broader structure of the administrative state. For nine decades, Humphrey’s Executor was the legal backstop that let Congress create agencies intended to operate somewhat apart from day-to-day White House politics. That backstop is now gone for any agency that, like the modern FTC, exercises meaningful executive functions. Given how expansively the Court described those functions, it is difficult to identify independent agencies not covered by Slaughter.
The Court acknowledged two possible exceptions — the Federal Reserve and non-Article III courts. In the companion case Trump v. Cook, decided the same day, the Court blocked the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, holding that the Federal Reserve’s unique monetary policy role justifies its continued independence and that removal requires cause tied to official conduct, along with due process protections including notice and an opportunity to respond. However, these seem to be fact-specific carve-outs, rather than a clearly bounded principle. This means the real limits of this ruling will likely be worked out agency by agency in future suits rather than firmly settled by Slaughter.
Future Implications
What are the implications in a post-Slaughter world? Future disputes over agency leadership will probably turn less on whether Congress meant to protect independence and more on whether a given agency’s day-to-day work counts as sufficiently “executive” under this new framework.
One near-term concern flagged by practitioners is regulatory volatility: with agency heads now removable at will, enforcement priorities and rulemaking agendas could shift significantly at the start of each administration, creating recurring uncertainty for regulated industries.
The ruling’s reasoning appears to extend directly to other multi-member commissions that exercise similar executive functions, including the SEC, NLRB, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the last of which has been repeatedly targeted by the Trump Administration.
More broadly, the decision is likely to accelerate a long-running shift away from a government built around insulated agencies and toward a more unified executive branch that answers directly to the president. Supporters frame it as a return to the Constitution’s original design and a check on unelected bureaucratic power. Opponents frame it as eliminating a deliberate safeguard that kept non-political agencies from partisan swings. No matter the reading, the underlying reality after Trump v. Slaughter is that presidential removal power over federal agencies is broader than at any point since 1935. It will now fall to Congress, the courts, and the political process to work out how the rest of the federal government adjusts.
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