DECODING: Trump v. Slaughter — can you fire the heads of independent agencies at will?

March 2025: Trump fires FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter

In March 2025, President Trump fired Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, an Obama-appointed Federal Trade Commission commissioner. Slaughter refused to recognize the firing as valid. Her position: a 91-year-old Supreme Court precedent — Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) — explicitly states that FTC commissioners can only be removed "for cause": documented inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance. Not political disagreement. Not ideological inconvenience. The administration's counter-argument: the president's authority under Article II of the Constitution extends to all executive officers, making "for cause" protections unconstitutional. A fundamental clash over the structure of American governance was heading to the Supreme Court.

What exactly is the FTC and why is its independence contested?

The Federal Trade Commission is a five-member bipartisan independent agency that enforces federal antitrust law and consumer protection regulations. It can investigate monopolistic practices, block mergers it considers anti-competitive, and fine companies for deceptive trade practices. Its bipartisan structure — no more than three commissioners from any single party — was deliberately designed by Congress to insulate its enforcement decisions from direct presidential control. For the industries the FTC regulates, that independence is commercially significant. For an administration with strong ties to those industries, that independence is a source of friction. The Trump firing was not a random act of personnel management. It was an attempt to end that friction.

I want to name clearly what the firing of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was really about. It wasn't about her performance. No documented inefficiency. No neglect of duty. No malfeasance. She was fired because she was an FTC commissioner whose votes the administration disliked — a regulator who exercised independent judgment in a body designed to exercise independent judgment. Firing her was not enforcing accountability. It was eliminating it.

The founding case for independent agency protection

William Humphrey was an FTC commissioner appointed by President Hoover whom President Roosevelt tried to remove in 1933 for political reasons — Humphrey's conservative views were incompatible with the New Deal agenda. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1935 that the removal was illegal: Congress had created the FTC specifically as a body independent of executive control, and the "for cause" removal protection gave that independence legal teeth. The Court drew a distinction between purely executive officers — who serve at the president's pleasure — and quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial officials of independent commissions, who are shielded from at-will removal. That distinction has structured American administrative law for nine decades.

The unitary executive theory as the challenge

The administration's challenge rests on the unitary executive theory: the idea that all executive power flows from and through the president, that no executive officer can be insulated from presidential control, and that Humphrey's Executor was wrongly decided. This theory holds that independent agencies with "for cause" protections create an unconstitutional "headless fourth branch" — officers who exercise executive power but cannot be removed by the president who is constitutionally responsible for executing the laws. In its strongest form, this theory would require overturning not just Humphrey's Executor but the entire framework of independent regulatory agencies built on its foundation.

The unitary executive theory is internally coherent. I will grant it that. But "internally coherent" and "correct" are not the same thing. A theory that, consistently applied, would require dismantling the Federal Reserve's independence, the FTC's bipartisan structure, the NLRB's enforcement capacity — a theory whose most logical conclusion is the concentration of economic regulatory power in a single presidential office — deserves more scrutiny than its formal elegance suggests. Coherence in the abstract and wisdom in practice are very different standards.

Single-director agencies: the crack in the wall

The Supreme Court had already partially eroded Humphrey's Executor before the Slaughter case reached argument. In Seila Law v. CFPB (2020), the Court ruled that the single director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be freely removed by the president. In Collins v. Yellen (2021), the same logic was applied to the single director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Both decisions emphasized a key structural feature: these were agencies led by a single director, not multi-member commissions. The Court distinguished them from Humphrey's Executor's multi-member FTC, explicitly leaving that precedent intact for commission-style bodies.

Why the FTC case is structurally different from Seila Law

The FTC is not a single-director agency. It is a five-member bipartisan commission — precisely the type of body the Court distinguished from the CFPB and FHFA in Seila Law and Collins. The administration's argument that those rulings logically extend to multi-member commissions was disputed at oral argument. Multiple justices — including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh — expressed concern that extending presidential removal power to multi-member commissions would necessarily sweep in the Federal Reserve, whose FOMC is also a multi-member body. That concern placed a significant constraint on the Court's reasoning options.

The Federal Reserve's implicit presence in the Slaughter oral arguments was the invisible third party in the courtroom. Roberts and Kavanaugh didn't need to say its name at every turn — the logic was self-evident. Any rule that lets the president fire Slaughter at will also lets the president fire Fed governors at will. For two conservative justices who are not hostile to executive authority in other contexts, that implication was visibly troubling. That tells you something about where the line is.

January 21, 2026: a court divided, but not in the expected direction

When the Slaughter and Cook cases were argued simultaneously on January 21, 2026, the Court's makeup — six conservatives, three liberals — might have suggested a simple majority for the administration's position. That is not what the arguments revealed. Six of the nine justices expressed skepticism about the administration's position. The concerns were varied but converged on a central worry: the downstream consequences of a ruling that gave presidents unlimited removal power over multi-member commissions. The FOMC implications dominated. The question was not whether the unitary executive theory had merit — some justices clearly found it compelling in the abstract. The question was whether its application in this context was worth the institutional cost.

The "for cause" protection as a market signal

Several justices probed what it would mean for global financial markets if the FOMC's "for cause" protection were eliminated. Foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds hold trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasury securities in part because they trust that Fed monetary policy is insulated from short-term political interference. If that insulation were removed — if a president could fire Fed governors who voted for rate hikes he disliked — the credibility of American monetary commitments would be in question. That is not an abstract judicial concern. It is a practical consequence that bond markets would price in immediately. Some justices, including Roberts, seemed acutely aware of that consequence.

I want to highlight something that usually gets lost in the technical legal analysis: what was being decided in January 2026 was not just a question of administrative law doctrine. It was a question about the architecture of trust that allows modern economies to function. The dollar is the world's reserve currency in part because the Fed is credibly independent. If the Court had ruled in the administration's favor, that credibility would have taken a measurable hit. Markets don't wait for philosophical debates to conclude. They react.

A bipartisan defense of Humphrey's Executor

The legal record in the Slaughter and Cook cases included an unusual coalition of amicus briefs. 45 former regulators from both Republican and Democratic administrations filed jointly to defend Humphrey's Executor. Former Fed chairs, former FTC and SEC commissioners, former NLRB members — figures who had served across administrations and across the ideological spectrum — argued that overturning the 1935 precedent would be disruptive well beyond its immediate legal effect. Their core argument: the independence of multi-member commissions is not a political preference — it is a structural requirement for regulatory institutions to function with the credibility their mandates require.

What former Republican regulators added to the record

The participation of former Republican regulators in the pro-Humphrey's Executor coalition was particularly significant. These are not figures ideologically opposed to executive authority or hostile to the Republican Party's regulatory philosophy. Their argument was explicitly pragmatic: the at-will removal of multi-member commission heads would not produce better governance — it would produce a different kind of governance, in which regulatory decisions are filtered through political loyalty rather than legal mandate. Former Republican appointees saying that in writing, in a Supreme Court amicus brief, is not a trivial signal about where serious professional opinion sits on this question.

When former Republican regulators file briefs defending a New Deal-era precedent against a Republican administration's challenge, that's worth pausing on. These are not progressive activists. These are former Republican appointees who understand from the inside how independent agencies work and why their independence matters. Their presence in that coalition tells you that the concern about overturning Humphrey's Executor crosses ideological lines in ways that the public debate sometimes fails to capture.

Two firings, one fundamental challenge

The Trump v. Slaughter case is inseparably linked to a parallel case: Trump v. Cook, concerning the firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in August 2025. Both cases raise the same constitutional question — the president's right to remove without cause the heads of independent financial and regulatory institutions. The Supreme Court heard both files simultaneously, suggesting it is seeking a unified answer — one that might create categories: some agencies protected (the Fed), others not (the FTC, the NLRB).

The financial and institutional stakes

The legal fees incurred by Lisa Cook and her attorneys to defend her position exceeded $1.3 million as of June 18, 2026, according to the Guardian. That figure illustrates a little-discussed dimension of these constitutional battles: individuals targeted by contested firings must often personally absorb enormous legal costs to assert their rights. Slaughter is in the same position. These personal costs add to the institutional pressure — and potentially deter other officials from challenging illegal dismissals in the future.

$1.3 million in legal fees to keep a position to which you were lawfully appointed. That is the price of institutional resistance in the United States of 2026. I respect the courage of Lisa Cook and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter for choosing to fight. But I find it deeply troubling that exercising constitutional rights costs this much — in money, in time, in personal toll.

Three possible outcomes and their real-world consequences

The Supreme Court's decision — expected before the end of June 2026 — would produce one of three fundamental outcomes. A full affirmation of Humphrey's Executor would protect all multi-member independent commissions, including the Fed's FOMC, and restore Slaughter and Cook to their positions. A partial ruling — carving out Federal Reserve protection while allowing broader presidential removal power over other commissions — would be constitutionally unsatisfying but practically targeted at the most urgent market stability concern. A full reversal of Humphrey's Executor would fundamentally restructure the American administrative state, exposing all independent agency commissioners to at-will presidential removal.

What the carve-out option would actually mean

The "Fed carve-out" option — protecting monetary policy independence while sacrificing broader commission independence — has a pragmatic appeal: it avoids the most immediately catastrophic market consequence while preserving room for the administration's theory to apply elsewhere. But it is constitutionally incoherent: if the principle is that Article II requires presidential control over executive officers, it cannot logically apply to some multi-member commissions and not others. The difference would be practical — market power — not constitutional. A pragmatic ruling might be the most politically sustainable outcome, but it would leave the underlying constitutional question unresolved and invite the next round of litigation immediately.

The carve-out solution bothers me — not because it protects the Fed, which matters enormously, but because it protects it for the wrong reason. "We'll let the FTC be politicized but not the Fed" is not a constitutional principle. It's a risk management calculation. And it leaves every independent agency without the Fed's market leverage exposed to the same firing dynamic that Slaughter faced. That's not a resolution. That's a postponement.

A precedent that cuts both ways

Whatever the Court decides, the ruling will apply to future administrations as well as the current one. A ruling against Humphrey's Executor would give a Democratic president the same removal power over independent commissions that the Republican administration was seeking. A ruling affirming Humphrey's Executor would constrain Democratic administrations equally. The principle, once established, does not carry ideological allegiances. This symmetry is one of the reasons why the bipartisan amicus coalition made sense: former regulators from both parties recognized that the rules they were defending would apply regardless of who held the presidency.

The long-term architecture of the administrative state

At its deepest level, the Slaughter case is a question about what kind of administrative state the United States will have in the 21st century. The independent agency model — built over 90 years on the foundation of Humphrey's Executor — represents a bet that certain functions of government benefit from insulation from electoral cycles. That bet has produced institutions with significant credibility: the Fed, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB. Overturning the legal foundation of that model would not automatically destroy those institutions — but it would change the terms on which they operate, and the people who choose to serve in them, in ways that are difficult to fully predict and difficult to reverse.

The administrative state is not a progressive invention. It is not a conservative enemy. It is the accumulated institutional architecture through which a complex modern economy governs itself. Its imperfections are real and documented. But the alternative to imperfect independent institutions is not clean unitary executive governance — it is politicized governance, in which regulatory outcomes track electoral cycles rather than institutional mandates. I know which one produces better long-term outcomes. The evidence from countries that have tried both is not ambiguous.

What the Supreme Court must decide — and why it matters beyond these two cases

The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter and the parallel Cook case will set the legal architecture for independent agencies for a generation. It will determine whether the 90-year framework of commission independence survives its most serious constitutional challenge. It will answer whether the unitary executive theory — compelling in the abstract, dangerous in its full application — has limits that the Court is willing to enforce. And it will tell the world whether American regulatory institutions can be trusted to operate consistently with their statutory mandates, regardless of who occupies the White House. That is not a small question. It is the institutional question of this moment.

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter: still at the FTC

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter refused to recognize her firing. She continued to show up to her office. She continued to participate in FTC proceedings as best she could within the procedural constraints of contested authority. That act of institutional defiance — holding a position because the law says you hold it, regardless of what the president says — is itself a statement about what independent agencies are supposed to be. The Supreme Court's ruling will either validate that defiance as constitutionally grounded, or declare that it was never legally tenable. The choice will say something lasting about the kind of republic the United States intends to remain.

I look at this case and see something larger than American administrative law. I see a fundamental question about what we want our societies to be: democracies where executive power is contained by independent institutions and the rule of law, or systems where whoever holds office controls everything. That is not a left-versus-right question. It is a question about liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. And the answer nine American judges give will echo far beyond the borders of the United States.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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