NPR (“Supreme Court cements Trump’s power over agencies long considered independent“):

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents a significant win for the Trump administration and a major expansion of the president’s control over parts of the government once seen as a check on his powers.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court found that President Trump’s March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful.

Since its creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, Congress has held that commissioners can only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Slaughter was presented with no such reason for her removal, only told her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with [the Trump] Administration’s priorities.”

Last summer, a lower court found her firing was unlawful, citing a 1935 landmark decision known as Humphrey’s Executor, a case prompted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempted firing of an FTC commissioner over ideological disagreements. The court unanimously held that while the president has the power to remove purely executive officers for any reason, that unlimited power does not extend to agencies like the FTC, whose duties, the court found, “are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”

The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor calling the decision “grievously wrong.”

“The Court gives 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 wrote.

The independence of the Federal Reserve remains intact — for now. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, can remain in her job until litigation is resolved in the lower courts.

Thursday’s decision marks a final blow to Humphrey’s Executor.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it,” Robert wrote in the majority opinion.

During Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court chipped away at the precedent when it let Trump fire the head of another independent agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In that case, the Supreme Court held that the firing was permissible because the CFPB is run by a single director rather than a multimember board. Chief Justice John Roberts described Humphrey’s Executor as applying only to multimember agencies “that do not wield substantial executive power.”

Now with this latest decision, the conservative majority has found reason to give the president power over multimember agencies, too.

In the majority opinion, Roberts pointed out that the FTC in its present state enforces and administers some 80 statutes that cover nearly every facet of the economy.

“The tasks it undertakes are ‘the very essence of ‘execution’ of the law,’” he wrote.

The ruling essentially turns FTC commissioners into at-will employees, who serve at the pleasure of the president. It also effectively ends Congress’ requirement that the FTC be bipartisan, so that no one party has too much sway.

[…]

The ruling also throws into question the protections afforded to members of a multitude of other federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump has also fired Democratic members.

Like the FTC, those agencies play important roles in the daily lives of Americans, protecting people from discrimination and abuse on the job and unsafe products, including toys.

Congress created those agencies and many others following the Supreme Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor, assuming that they would operate with some degree of independence from the White House.

In the majority opinion, Roberts acknowledged that “not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive power,” but cited non-Article III courts, such as the U.S. Tax Court, and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as examples of such offices, not agencies such as the EEOC.

As a matter of pure Constitutional interpretation, the ruling here is plausible. The very first sentence of Article II plainly states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The FTC is rather clearly part of the Executive branch of government and executes the law. It stands to reason, then, that its commissioners would serve at the pleasure of the Chief Executive.

But it’s also true that the FTC is carrying out functions explicitly enumerated to Congress in Article I, Section 8. In Humphrey’s Executor, the Court rightly reasoned,

The Federal Trade Commission . . . is an administrative body created by Congress to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid. Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive. Its duties are performed without executive leave, and, in the contemplation of the statute, must be free from executive control. To the extent that it exercises any executive function — as distinguished from executive power in the constitutional sense — it does so in the discharge and effectuation of its quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the Government.

American society is considerably more complex now than it was in 1935. It makes even more sense now than then that some regulatory functions should be carried out by subject matter experts not subject to the changing whims of the electorate.

Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern (“The Supreme Court Takes One More Big Step Toward Autocracy“):

[T]he biggest winner here isn’t even Trump; it’s SCOTUS itself. The court not only gets to establish sweeping new rules of American governance, but also to tweak those rules as necessary to favor presidential policies it prefers while quashing those it dislikes. Who could possibly call this a democracy?

[…]

The impact of this decision is gobsmacking. It strips independence from a vast range of federal agencies, including those that regulate nuclear energy, consumer safety, unions, hazardous chemicals, mine safety, crypto, and large swaths of the economy. Trump can now seize unquestioned control over the bodies that exercise these vast regulatory powers. He can order them to give up their traditional missions—bipartisan execution of laws passed by Congress—and start pursuing his own priorities instead.

SCOTUS previewed this outcome last year when it preliminarily allowed Trump to fire Slaughter and other agency heads, telegraphing Monday’s decision. So we’ve already gotten a taste of the consequences. For instance, while the Trump-controlled FTC relaxes scrutiny of mergers (especially for companies allied with the president), it has launched a full-on assault against gender-affirming care for minors, a field far outside its mission. And when the previous postmaster general declined to do Trump’s bidding, the president pushed him out and replaced him with a crony who has agreed to withhold mail ballots in blue states. Congress intended for the Postal Service to run independently from partisan politics. The Supreme Court evidently sees that arrangement as an assault on the separation of powers.

And yet there is one single agency whose independence SCOTUS continues to safeguard: the Fed. In tandem with Slaughter, the chief justice announced Cook, which prevents Trump from removing Lisa Cook from the Fed’s board of governors. The decision was 5–4, with Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the liberals.

On what basis could Roberts and Kavanaugh possibly allow Trump to purge Democratic appointees from the rest of the administrative state while zealously protecting members of the Fed? Roberts barely bothered to explain. After recounting the various permutations of a central bank throughout American history, he concluded that the Fed’s independence constitutes a “special arrangement sanctioned by history.” What does that mean? Kavanaugh, in a concurrence, added his own gloss, reiterating the court’s previous declaration that the Fed is a “quasi-private, uniquely structured entity” with a “distinct historical tradition.” But its board of governors is not actually quasi-private or unique, except in the sense that all federal agencies have some unique origin story. So, again: What is the constitutional distinction that allowed the court to spare the Fed from its otherwise categorical execution of agency independence?

To his credit, Kavanaugh comes admirably close to giving us the answer: The Fed is just too important to leave in the hands of the president. In his concurrence, he warned that letting Trump fire Cook would “jeopardize the efficacy of U. S. monetary policy,” “spark political upheaval,” cause “turmoil in the U. S. and world economies,” and “risk destabilizing the U. S. economy.” (Kavanaugh didn’t say so explicitly, but the real threat was that Trump would force a hand-picked Fed to prematurely lower interest rates, risking an inflation spiral.) The justice refused to “go down that road,” instead settling the issue now. So he joined the court in holding that the Fed’s board of governors may only be removed “for cause,” and Trump did not give Cook sufficient opportunity to rebut his (bogus) claim that she committed mortgage fraud.

Is this a rational way to structure the U.S. government? Reasonable people may disagree. But is this how the Constitution structures the U.S. government? Come on. In reality, no provision of the Constitution addresses the president’s removal power, and the Framers themselves vigorously disagreed on the subject. By contrast, the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to establish federal agencies and define the scope of their mandate. Roberts ignored this enumerated power in favor of a secret, unwritten right of the president to remove agency heads. He then established a secret, unwritten exception to this power for an institution whose independence he favors for practical, even self-interested reasons. (Even the justices have retirement accounts.)

Indeed, as Justice Amy Comey Barrett drolly puts it in her dissent, “the Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today.” That the central bank has always been considered independent is hardly dispositive. So has the FTC.