The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Monday that the president can fire the heads of independent federal agencies without cause, overturning 90 years of precedent and striking at the heart of the administrative state that has governed Americans without their vote.
The decision in Trump v Slaughter means the only person in the executive branch directly accountable to voters can finally remove subordinates who refuse to carry out the administration's policies — or as Chief Justice John Roberts put it, Congress and the courts may not "saddle him with those with whom he cannot work." Roberts wrote that subordinates exercising presidential power must be removable by the president, so they "remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."
The case started when Trump fired Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter over email in March 2025, telling her that keeping her as commissioner would be "inconsistent with [the] administration's priorities." Slaughter, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sued. A DC federal judge and an appeals court panel both ruled she was wrongly fired, with two appeals judges writing that any ruling for the government "would have to defy binding, on-point, and repeatedly preserved supreme court precedent."
That precedent was Humphrey's Executor v United States, the landmark 1935 ruling that let Congress restrict the president's ability to fire commissioners at agencies like the FTC. Conservative legal analysts have long argued Humphrey's Executor unconstitutionally infringed on the president's Article II powers and created an unaccountable fourth branch of government. Roberts noted during oral arguments that the FTC in 1935 had "very little, if any, executive power" compared to its current status — a practical acknowledgment that these agencies have accumulated power the founders never intended.
The dissent, from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned the court was undoing "centuries of political practice." Sotomayor wrote that the majority "gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches."
Former NLRB chair Lauren McFerran and former NLRB official Celine McNicholas warned in an Economic Policy Institute report that eliminating removal protections would make agency leaders reluctant to act "without coordinating with the White House for fear of termination." That is, of course, the entire point — if agency heads answer to the president, the president answers to the voters, and the voters can fire him.
But the court drew one notable line. In a separate 5-4 ruling, the justices held that Trump's firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook was unconstitutional, protecting the central bank's independence. Cook, a Biden appointee whose term runs until 2038, was fired last August after Trump claimed she committed mortgage fraud, which Cook denied. The Guardian framed this as Trump "finally" meeting his limit; CNN called it the most consequential case for the Fed's future. The carve-out raises the obvious question: if the Constitution requires presidential accountability over agencies that enforce consumer protection laws, why does the institution that sets interest rates — and can crash the economy — get to operate as a self-governing fiefdom?
The answer the court seems to be settling on is that some independence is more equal than others. The FTC ruling restores the constitutional structure the founders designed — executive power exercised by executives who can be removed. The Fed ruling preserves a technocratic enclave that sets the price of borrowing money without any direct democratic check. Both cannot be right forever.
