The Supreme Court did something on Monday that constitutional scholars have been debating for 91 years. It overruled Humphrey’s Executor and told Congress it cannot wall off executive branch officers from presidential removal by dressing them up as “independent.” The vote was 6-3. The decision was correct. And the reaction from the Left tells you everything about how much power they’d built into those supposedly neutral agencies.
The case is Trump v. Slaughter, decided June 29. Rebecca Slaughter, a Federal Trade Commission commissioner initially appointed by President Donald Trump and renominated by former President Joe Biden, was fired in March 2025 on the grounds that keeping her on would be “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” No finding of misconduct. No neglect of duty. Just a straightforward assertion that the executive branch belongs to the executive.
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She sued. Lower courts ordered reinstatement. The Supreme Court, over a 49-page dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said no.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and the core reasoning is simple enough that it shouldn’t require a law degree to follow. “Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one president,” Roberts wrote. Officers who exercise executive power are subject to removal by the president. “Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.” That’s not a theory of unlimited authority — it’s the basic accountability chain that makes representative government function. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence put it more bluntly: “Independent agencies are not so independent after all.”
Humphrey’s Executor — the 1935 precedent the court overruled — was always a historical anomaly. It emerged from FDR’s war with the Supreme Court over New Deal agencies, holding that Congress could restrict presidential removal of FTC commissioners to cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The theory was that some agencies were quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial in nature, and therefore somehow outside normal executive authority. That logic was always strained. The FTC administers roughly 80 statutes covering nearly every facet of the economy. It makes rules. It enforces law. It adjudicates disputes. That is executive work, and Roberts said so plainly: “The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive.”
I’ve spent 30 years advising institutional clients who operate under agency supervision. The Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the FTC — these agencies shape investment decisions, compliance frameworks, and enforcement risk in ways that have real dollar consequences for the people I represent. I’ve watched them operate with extraordinary deference from courts and minimal supervision from anyone elected. The independence argument, in practice, meant nobody was accountable. Not the commissioners who served seven-year terms regardless of electoral outcomes. Not the staff who outlasted administrations. Not the enforcement divisions that made filing decisions behind closed doors. Calling that democratic governance requires a very creative reading of the word.
Sotomayor’s dissent argues that Monday’s ruling “upends rather than upholds the separation of powers” and gives the president authority unknown even to the English Crown. That framing gets the Constitution backward. Article II vests the executive power in the president, singular, not in a collection of independent commissioners who happen to draw federal paychecks. The proliferation of independent agencies is a 20th-century innovation layered on top of that original design, not a feature of it. The court didn’t invent presidential authority on Monday. It reclaimed what Congress had spent ninety-one years slowly carving away.
The same day the court decided Slaughter, it issued a second ruling in Trump v. Cook, blocking Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook — for now, on narrow procedural grounds. Roberts, joined by Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices, held that the Fed’s unique structure and history in American central banking warrant different treatment. That distinction matters: The court is not writing a blank check for agency abolition. It’s enforcing a coherent constitutional principle. Officers who execute law against private parties’ who exercise executive power and answer to the president. The Fed, with its quasi-private structure and century-old tradition of political insulation, sits in a different category. The line isn’t arbitrary. It’s constitutional.
SUPREME COURT EXPANDS TRUMP’S POWER TO FIRE OFFICIALS AT INDEPENDENT AGENCIES
The ruling directly affects roughly two dozen multimember agencies — the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among others. Congress can still require bipartisan composition. It can still structure agencies with staggered terms and Senate confirmation. What it cannot do is exempt those officers from removal when the president concludes they’re working against his administration’s policies. That’s the difference between a president who governs and a president who presides over a bureaucracy he can’t direct.
The electorate voted for a candidate with specific views on how these agencies should operate. Monday’s ruling means those views can actually be implemented. That’s not a constitutional crisis. That’s elections having consequences — which is exactly what the people complaining loudest have always claimed to want.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
