White House counsel Will Scharf says the Supreme Court's June ruling in Trump v. Slaughter — which expanded presidential authority over independent federal agencies — is the most important constitutional victory this administration has secured, and it's the one that matters most for ordinary Americans who've been governed by bureaucrats they never elected.
Speaking Thursday at the Federalist Society's annual National Lawyers Convention in Washington, Scharf called the decision the correction of a "historic constitutional wrong," according to the Washington Examiner. The ruling chips away at the architecture of the administrative state — that web of independent agencies that operate with minimal presidential oversight and zero accountability to voters.
The stakes are straightforward. For decades, independent agencies — from the FTC to the FEC to the NLRB — have exercised quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial power without meaningful check from the elected executive. The Constitution vests executive power in the President, not in unaccountable commissions. Trump v. Slaughter moves the needle back toward that original design, affirming that the President has authority to direct the executive branch officials who wield power over Americans' lives and livelihoods.
Scharf, who joined the White House counsel's office after representing Trump in multiple legal battles, identified the ruling as a defining victory for the administration's broader effort to bring executive branch agencies under presidential control. The Federalist Society audience — long skeptical of the administrative state's constitutional legitimacy — received the message as a marker of real progress.
Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, for their part, spent the same news cycle on Biden's memoir and Cheesecake Factory dining habits. The establishment press would rather cover anything other than a constitutional ruling that curtails the power of unelected regulators.
The open question: whether this ruling produces lasting structural change or simply shifts the same concentrated power into different hands. Correcting a constitutional wrong on paper is one thing. Dismantling the administrative state in practice — against an entrenched bureaucracy that fights for its own survival — is another.
