The real story behind the Supreme Court’s newest removal-power ruling isn’t that a president suddenly acquired limitless authority overnight — it’s that the Court spent a century laying track for this exact outcome, one case at a time, until the final switch was thrown in June 2026.
Key Points
- In Trump v. Slaughter (June 29, 2026), the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), holding that “for cause” removal protections for FTC commissioners violate the separation of powers.
- The 6-3 decision extends presidential removal authority over roughly two dozen multi-member independent agencies, including the CFPB, NLRB, and Merit Systems Protection Board.
- The same Court preserved a distinct exception for the Federal Reserve in the companion case involving Governor Lisa Cook, undercutting claims that presidential power is now truly “unlimited”.
- The ruling is the culmination of a doctrinal arc running from Myers v. United States (1926) through Seila Law and Collins v. Yellen — not an isolated or sudden reversal.
- Dissenting justices warn the decision hands “full control” of independent agencies to the president “for any reason or no reason,” raising durable concerns about regulatory politicization.
What the Court Actually Decided
Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic FTC commissioner first appointed by President Trump in 2018 and reappointed under President Biden, was removed by President Trump without the statutory cause Congress had required — inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance. She sued, arguing the FTC Act’s removal protections were settled law. The Supreme Court disagreed. By a 6-3 vote, the Court held that the statute’s “for cause” restriction “is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” and in doing so expressly overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had authorized exactly this kind of insulation for multi-member regulatory bodies.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, framed the holding around the president’s need to remove subordinates he cannot work with — a functional argument, not merely a formal one. SCOTUSblog’s coverage described the practical sweep bluntly: the ruling gives the president “sweeping new authority over approximately two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent”. That number matters. It’s not just the FTC. It’s every agency built on the Humphrey’s Executor template — bodies Congress deliberately staffed with fixed terms and removal insulation precisely so that antitrust enforcement, labor rulings, or consumer-finance regulation wouldn’t reset with every election.
A Century in the Making, Not a Sudden Break
Treating Slaughter as a bolt from the blue misreads the last hundred years of removal-power jurisprudence. The doctrinal line starts with Myers v. United States in 1926, where the Court first held that the president’s power to remove executive officials flows directly from Article II and the Take Care Clause. Nine years later, Humphrey’s Executor carved out the exception — Congress, the Court said then, could limit removal of officials at multi-member agencies performing quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions, because such bodies weren’t purely executive in character.
That exception survived for nine decades, but it survived on narrowing terms. Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB (2010), Seila Law v. CFPB (2020), and Collins v. Yellen (2021) each chipped at Humphrey’s Executor without formally killing it — restricting double-layered for-cause protections, then stripping insulation from single-director agencies like the CFPB, then limiting who could invoke the exception at all. Slaughter is the point where the Court stopped chipping and simply removed the load-bearing wall. The legal reasoning didn’t appear from nowhere; it’s the terminus of a project the Court’s conservative majority had been building case by case since at least 2010.
The Federal Reserve Exception — and Why It Complicates the “Unlimited Power” Narrative
Here is where the more sensational framing of this ruling runs into trouble. In a companion dispute, Trump v. Cook, the same Court that gave the president at-will removal power over the FTC declined to let him remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, amid disputed allegations of mortgage fraud that Cook denies. NPR’s reporting captured the apparent contradiction directly: the Court found “the president may lawfully fire members of independent agencies pretty much for any reason,” yet in the same term held the Fed’s structure warranted special protection. Justice Thomas dissented from that carve-out, arguing the distinction was a policy preference dressed up as constitutional doctrine, with no textual basis for treating the Fed differently from any other multi-member body.
Whatever one thinks of the Fed exception’s coherence, its existence is itself the strongest evidence against the “unlimited power” framing. A president who can fire FTC commissioners at will but cannot touch a sitting Federal Reserve governor over disputed allegations does not possess unbounded authority — he possesses a newly enlarged but still judicially bounded one. Rebecca Slaughter herself pointed to this asymmetry publicly, calling it a “Wall Street exception,” a framing that resonates precisely because it highlights the Court drawing a line rather than erasing all lines.
What Dissenters and Supporters Each Get Right
Justice Kagan’s dissent, quoted in SCOTUSblog’s survey of the Court’s recent agency rulings, warned the majority had effectively “hand[ed] full control of all those agencies to the President,” who may now remove commissioners “for any reason or no reason” regardless of what Congress specified in statute. That’s a fair reading of the doctrinal mechanics — the statutory text is now, in practice, unenforceable against presidential removal at these agencies. On the other side, the administration’s lawyers argued that insulated multi-member agencies had become a “headless fourth branch insulated from political accountability and democratic control,” a framing conservative justices found persuasive because it locates the harm in unaccountable bureaucratic power rather than in the president himself. Both concerns are genuine; they simply weigh accountability differently — one side prioritizing insulation from politics, the other prioritizing electoral accountability over regulators who wield real coercive power.
Why This Outlasts Any Single Presidency
The most important thing to understand about Trump v. Slaughter is that its legal logic is president-neutral. The unitary executive theory the majority embraced doesn’t expire when this administration ends; it transfers intact to whoever holds the office next, of either party. A future Democratic president would inherit exactly the same at-will removal power over FTC commissioners, NLRB members, and comparable agency heads that this ruling created. That durability is precisely why administrative-law scholars treat the decision as structural rather than partisan — and why the Brennan Center and similar critics situate it within a broader pattern of the Court reallocating power toward the executive branch across multiple recent terms. The debate ahead won’t be whether this ruling stands; overruling a precedent as explicitly as the Court did here leaves little room for reversal absent a new majority. The debate will be how far the “roughly two dozen agencies” language extends in practice, and whether the Fed exception proves to be a stable boundary or the first crack in a doctrine still being written one case at a time.
