Key facts
- The Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump had the authority to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.
- The decision reverses a lower court's ruling that had blocked Slaughter's dismissal.
- The ruling expands the president's power over independent regulatory agencies.
- The FTC commissioners have tenure protections enacted by Congress, allowing removal only for cause.
- The Supreme Court cited the 'unitary executive' theory in its decision.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday backed Donald Trump's firing of a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding the president's power over a regulatory agency that had long been insulated from White House control. The justices reversed a lower court's ruling that had blocked Trump's dismissal of Rebecca Slaughter over policy differences. The lower court had cited tenure protections for FTC members enacted by Congress more than a century ago and upheld by the Supreme Court in a 1935 case called Humphrey's Executor v. United States. A 1914 law passed by Congress permits a president to remove FTC commissioners only for cause—such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office—but not for policy differences. Similar protections cover officials at more than two dozen other independent agencies. Slaughter, appointed to her post by Democratic former President Joe Biden, was one of two Democratic FTC commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March 2025 from the consumer protection and antitrust agency. Slaughter's term was due to run until 2029. Democratic senators and antimonopoly groups voiced concern that Trump, with the firings, sought to eliminate the agency's scrutiny of big corporations. Washington-based U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in July 2025 blocked Trump's firing of Slaughter, rejecting his administration's argument that the tenure protections unlawfully encroached on presidential power. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit the following month in a 2-1 decision kept AliKhan's ruling in place. But the Supreme Court in September allowed Trump's ouster of Slaughter to go into effect—an action that drew dissents from its three liberal justices—while agreeing to hear arguments in the case. The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause complied with the Constitution in light of the Humphrey's Executor precedent. The court in Humphrey's Executor rebuffed Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to fire an FTC member over policy differences despite tenure protections given by Congress. In the 1935 decision, the court said restricting a president's removal of commissioners was lawful because the FTC performed tasks more closely resembling legislative and judicial functions rather than those belonging squarely to the executive branch, headed by the president. The Trump administration argued that the modern FTC grew to wield substantial executive power in the decades since the Humphrey's Executor decision, draining that ruling of its force. The arguments advanced by Justice Department lawyers representing Trump in the case embraced the 'unitary executive' theory. This conservative legal doctrine sees the president as possessing sole authority over the executive branch, including the power to fire and replace heads of independent agencies at will, despite legal protections provided by Congress for these positions. The Constitution set up a separation of powers among the U.S. government's coequal executive, legislative and judicial branches as part of a system of checks and balances. The Supreme Court in recent decades narrowed the reach of Humphrey's Executor but stopped short of overturning it. In a 2020 ruling, it said the Constitution's Article II gives the president the general power to remove heads of agencies at will but that the 1935 precedent had carved out an exception that allowed for-cause removal protections for certain multi-member, expert agencies. During arguments in the case in December, the liberal justices cautioned that giving the president power over federal agencies that regulate key aspects of American life and business—from finance to air traffic safety to labor relations—would subvert the decision by Congress to entrust these issues to nonpartisan experts in independent agencies.