The Supreme Court hands Trump almost royal power over the state

Introduction: a Monday that changed the mechanics of American power

A technical ruling with enormous consequences

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling that, behind the appearance of an obscure administrative case, deeply redraws the balance of power in Washington. In a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that the president can now dismiss members of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, at will, without having to invoke any legal cause whatsoever, according to the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts and published on the official Supreme Court website.

This ruling brings to a close a judicial saga that began in March 2025, when Donald Trump fired, without explanation, Democratic commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and her colleague Alvaro Bedoya, in apparent violation of a federal law protecting commissioners from arbitrary dismissal, as reported by SCOTUSblog.

A narrative that begins with a contested dismissal

I choose to tell this story as a narrative because it has all the elements of an institutional drama: a woman appointed for seven years, fired without cause, who fights in court for more than a year, only to see the nation's highest court validate her dismissal and, in the process, demolish a 91-year-old precedent.

That precedent is called Humphrey's Executor v. United States, decided in 1935, a unanimous ruling that had allowed Congress to create so-called independent agencies, shielded from the political moods of the White House, according to Wikipedia and judicial archives cited by Morgan Lewis.

The central figure: Rebecca Slaughter, ousted commissioner

A career interrupted without warning

Rebecca Slaughter had sat on the FTC since 2018, originally appointed under a different presidency, before being brutally removed in March 2025 by the Trump administration, without any of the legally required grounds — inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance — being invoked, according to Wikipedia and NPR.

A federal district judge had nonetheless restored her to her position as early as July 2025, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, before the Supreme Court stepped in to stay that reinstatement, according to court documents reviewed via the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

An unflinching public reaction

After the final ruling, Slaughter warned that the decision "opens the door to abuse of presidential power," according to remarks reported by the New York Times, adding that presidents will now be able to remove regulators who put principle ahead of political interests and replace them with compliant figures.

She went further in a televised interview, calling the decision a "massive transfer of power" from Congress to the presidency, a conclusion I find hard to dispute given how the very language of the majority opinion enshrines an almost absolute vision of executive authority.

The majority's argument: the unitary executive theory triumphs

Roberts and the doctrine of total subordination

In his 36-page opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that "the president cannot faithfully execute the laws if he cannot supervise those who execute them," a formulation that sums up the entire philosophy of the unitary executive theory, according to excerpts cited by SHRM and SCOTUSblog.

This theory holds that the president should be able to dismiss any member of the executive branch, including the heads of supposedly independent agencies, a constitutional vision that, if generalized, would considerably reduce Congress's role in designing oversight bodies shielded from partisan politics.

Twenty-five federal agencies affected

The scope of this decision extends far beyond the FTC alone: according to SCOTUSblog, the ruling grants the president new authority over roughly two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress had intended to make independent, a figure that gives a sense of the scale of the institutional upheaval underway.

This shift potentially touches bodies as varied as the National Labor Relations Board or the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose leaders had already been targeted by attempted presidential dismissals even before the Slaughter decision, according to historical background published by SCOTUSblog.

Kagan's dissent: an unflinching warning

"Any member, for any reason"

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, had already warned as early as September 2025, in an interim order, that the majority "has given the president complete control over all these agencies," who can now "remove any member he wants, for any reason or no reason at all," according to the text of her dissent reviewed via the Supreme Court.

This dissenting prediction proved accurate when the final ruling came down in June 2026, confirming that overturning Humphrey's Executor would indeed wipe out the bipartisan independence Congress had sought to guarantee these commissions since 1935.

A notable exception for the Federal Reserve

Tellingly, the Court explicitly spared the leaders of the Federal Reserve in a companion decision, Trump v. Cook, handed down the same day, recognizing that political control of the central bank would threaten an American tradition of monetary management shielded from electoral pressures, according to NPR and Morgan Lewis.

This selective exception, in my view, illustrates an embarrassing contradiction: if institutional independence is deemed essential for monetary policy, why would it not be equally essential for consumer protection or the regulation of economic competition?

The bigger picture: a presidency accumulating powers

A string of court victories

This decision fits into an already well-established trajectory: as early as 2025, the same conservative majority had allowed the president to dismiss without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, according to legal references recalled in Kagan's dissent and published by the Supreme Court.

Each of these decisions, taken in isolation, could seem technical and minor. Put end to end, they trace a coherent trajectory toward a presidency endowed with almost total control over the entire American federal regulatory apparatus.

Senator Durbin sounds the alarm

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, an influential member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reacted by saying that "this president can now fire anyone he perceives as his enemy in these agencies without even having to cite a cause," according to remarks cited by CNBC.

This concern, coming from a seasoned lawmaker rather than a mere partisan commentator, deserves to be taken seriously, as it underscores the legal vacuum now created around protecting federal officials from purely political retaliation.

What this means for the West and its democratic credibility

A signal sent to rival authoritarian regimes

For the West, which claims to embody a model of governance based on the separation of powers in contrast to regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia or the Chinese Communist Party, this concentration of presidential power sends a contradictory and embarrassing signal on the international stage.

How can one seriously criticize Beijing or Moscow for the absence of institutional checks and balances when the free world's leading democracy is itself weakening, decision after decision, the mechanisms meant to limit the arbitrariness of its own executive?

A fragility that benefits strategic adversaries

China, Iran, Russia and North Korea are closely watching every sign of American institutional weakening, seeking to exploit any perception of democratic dysfunction in their respective propaganda aimed at discrediting the Western model among their own populations.

I remain convinced that the West must remain the normative center of gravity of the free world, but that very conviction obliges me to criticize all the more forcefully decisions that weaken, from within, the credibility of this model against its authoritarian rivals.

The Wilcox and Boyle precedent: a methodical preview

A judicial strategy in successive steps

Even before the Slaughter case, the Court had already, through successive interim orders in Trump v. Wilcox and Trump v. Boyle, allowed the president to dismiss other independent agency heads, a method Kagan explicitly denounced as a gradual workaround of Humphrey's Executor without ever formally overturning it, until this June Monday.

This piecemeal approach, order after order, before the final blow, reveals a coherent judicial strategy that took less than two years to demolish a 91-year-old precedent, a pace of constitutional change that should worry any observer attached to the stability of the law.

The question that remains open for the future

It remains to be seen how this new doctrine will apply to other federal bodies, particularly those tasked with overseeing elections or guaranteeing the independence of certain investigations, gray areas the Court has not yet explicitly ruled on but which this decision now leaves far more vulnerable to direct presidential intervention.

I readily admit I do not know with certainty how far this logic will be extended in the coming years, nor whether a future Congress, Democratic or Republican, will one day attempt to legislate to restore some of the lost protections.

The Trump administration's reaction: a victory claimed loudly

A triumphant spokesperson

The White House, through spokesperson Kush Desai, had already stated even before the final ruling that "President Trump acted within the bounds of the law" in dismissing Slaughter, adding that the Supreme Court had "already reaffirmed twice" the president's power to remove executive agency heads, according to remarks reported by CNBC.

This rhetoric of a victory announced in advance, later confirmed by the judicial facts, illustrates the strategic confidence of the president's legal team, which clearly knew it could count on a majority of justices receptive to its vision of the unitary executive theory.

Trump himself savors the decision

The president called this decision the "biggest and most consequential" handed down by the Court during his term, claiming it restored "tremendous power" to the American presidency, according to remarks made in a televised interview picked up by Bloomberg.

This public self-satisfaction, far from trivial, reveals just how much this legal victory serves as a centerpiece of his broader strategy to consolidate unprecedented executive control over the federal administrative apparatus.

Dissenting voices in American civil society

Consumer advocacy groups voice concern

Several consumer rights organizations have warned that weakening the FTC's independence could compromise its future ability to investigate major tech companies or sanction abusive business practices whenever such investigations would clash with the political or economic interests of the sitting executive.

These fears are not pure speculation: an agency whose commissioners know they can be fired overnight for displeasing the president will be structurally less inclined to pursue robust investigations against companies close to the executive branch.

A precedent that worries people across partisan lines

Notably, criticism of this decision does not come solely from the Democratic camp: several conservative legal scholars, attached to a more traditional vision of the separation of powers, have also expressed reservations about the scale of the shift brought about by this decision, according to analyses published by law firms such as Morgan Lewis.

This cross-partisan concern should serve as a reminder that defending strong institutional checks and balances should never depend on the political color of the party currently in power, a lesson American history has already taught more than once.

The future of so-called independent agencies after Slaughter

A complete redefinition of administrative independence

The very concept of an "independent agency," which has structured American administrative governance for nearly a century, must now be rethought in light of this decision, since protection against arbitrary dismissal was precisely the core of that institutional independence.

Without that protection, these agencies effectively become direct extensions of presidential will, capable of shifting political direction overnight simply through the replacement of their leaders, without any legislative debate or additional Senate confirmation process.

A weakened Congress facing its own institutional creations

Congress, which had deliberately designed these multi-member, bipartisan commissions to shield them from immediate political pressure, now finds itself stripped of a fundamental legislative tool, without any new law having been passed to justify this radical shift in constitutional interpretation.

This legislative dispossession, carried out solely through the courts, illustrates a troubling dynamic in which the Supreme Court redraws the balance of power between branches of government without the people's elected representatives having been directly consulted on this change.

The international dimension: comparisons with other democracies

A contrast with European parliamentary models

In several European parliamentary democracies, economic regulatory authorities generally benefit from stronger institutional protections against direct interference from the executive branch, a model several comparative law experts consider more robust against temptations to concentrate power.

This transatlantic divergence deserves to be highlighted at a time when the West is trying to present a united front against authoritarian regimes: an American model increasingly centered on a strong executive contrasts with the institutional safeguards several European allies continue to fiercely defend.

A lesson for fragile democracies elsewhere in the world

For young democracies still trying to consolidate their own independent institutions, particularly in Eastern Europe or in certain regions directly confronted with Russian influence, this American precedent could unfortunately serve as a convenient argument for leaders themselves tempted by the concentration of executive power.

It is precisely this kind of geopolitical domino effect that makes this American decision far more than a simple internal administrative dispute: it sends a potentially dangerous normative signal worldwide.

The role of lower courts in this judicial saga

Successive rulings overturned in a cascade

Before reaching the Supreme Court, the Slaughter case had a turbulent judicial journey: a district judge had ordered her reinstatement, a decision upheld on appeal by a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a tight 2-1 vote, before the Supreme Court stepped in to stay and ultimately reverse these lower rulings.

This cascading reversal illustrates the ability of the country's highest court to overturn, as a final instance, decisions nonetheless issued by federal judges who had faithfully applied the existing precedent at the time of their respective rulings.

A lesson in humility for legal scholars themselves

This judicial journey is also a reminder that even the most experienced legal scholars sometimes struggle to predict with certainty the final outcome of a major constitutional case, given how quickly the balance of power within the Supreme Court can shift with successive appointments and internal dynamics among justices.

I readily admit I do not have the legal training needed to anticipate with certainty all the future technical ramifications of this decision, but as an attentive observer, I can see the scale of the institutional paradigm shift it inaugurates.

What this concretely changes for ordinary American citizens

Potentially weakened regulatory protection

For the average American consumer, this decision could eventually mean less vigorous investigations into abusive business practices, anticompetitive mergers, or digital privacy protection, if future FTC commissioners know they risk immediate dismissal for disagreeing with the sitting executive.

This dynamic could particularly affect sensitive cases involving major tech companies with close political ties to the administration of the day, a scenario several consumer advocates already consider troubling.

A precedent that extends far beyond the Trump term alone

It is essential to remember that this legal precedent will not apply only to the current administration: any future president, Democratic or Republican, will now inherit this same expanded power of arbitrary dismissal over all these federal agencies.

This institutional permanence of the precedent should prompt all citizens, regardless of their current partisan preferences, to seriously reflect on the long-term consequences of a federal executive stripped of historically well-established administrative checks and balances.

The historical 1935 precedent deserves to be recalled in detail

Franklin Roosevelt versus William Humphrey, the origin of the dispute

The founding 1935 case originates in the dismissal, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of commissioner William Humphrey, a purely political disagreement tied to New Deal policies, according to historical background published by Wikipedia and cited in several contemporary legal analyses.

The Supreme Court of that era, in a unanimous decision written by Justice George Sutherland, had ruled that the "quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial" functions of the FTC justified protection against arbitrary dismissal, reasoning the current Supreme Court majority has now explicitly rejected as outdated.

A century of administrative governance called into question

This complete reversal of reasoning that was nonetheless unanimous at the time illustrates how American constitutional interpretation can shift radically over the decades, following successive judicial appointments and changing ideological balances within the country's highest court.

This interpretive shift, however dizzying on a strictly legal level, will have very real consequences for millions of Americans who depend, often without realizing it, on the vigilance of these federal agencies for their daily protection against commercial and financial abuse.

Conclusion: a turning point that calls for democratic vigilance

A precedent that durably redefines Washington

This Supreme Court decision will stand as one of the most significant milestones of the Trump presidency in terms of constitutional redistribution of power, far beyond the individual case of Rebecca Slaughter and her turbulent tenure at the FTC.

History will record that the Court, through a coherent conservative majority, chose to sacrifice 91 years of protective case law in the name of a maximalist vision of executive power, a decision whose institutional repercussions will be felt well beyond 2026.

Vigilance needed for the future of Western democracy

Facing strategic adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, who are only waiting for a pretext to discredit the Western democratic model, American citizens and their allies must remain especially vigilant against any excessive concentration of executive power, no matter who wields it.

This judicial narrative, however technical it may seem at first glance, deserves to be told and widely understood, because it directly touches the future ability of American citizens to hold their leaders accountable.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My acknowledged biases

I firmly believe that the strength of institutional checks and balances remains essential to the West's credibility in the face of authoritarian regimes such as Vladimir Putin's Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. This conviction leads me to critically examine any decision, regardless of who initiates it, that weakens these mechanisms of democratic accountability.

What I don't know yet

I cannot predict with certainty how this new doctrine will concretely apply to other federal agencies in the years ahead, nor whether a future Congress will choose to legislate to restore certain institutional protections weakened by this decision.

Sources

Primary sources

Supreme Court of the United States — Trump v. Slaughter, full opinion, June 29, 2026

SCOTUSblog — Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power, June 30, 2026

Secondary sources

Devdiscourse — Supreme Court expands presidential powers with landmark FTC ruling, June 29, 2026

CBS News — Supreme Court, Trump and the expansion of presidential power, June 29, 2026

CNBC — Supreme Court lets Trump fire FTC member, boosts presidential power, June 29, 2026

NPR — Supreme Court cements Trump's power over independent agencies, June 29, 2026

The New York Times — Fired FTC commissioner warns of potential for presidential abuse of power, June 29, 2026