By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hand Donald Trump broad authority to fire regulatory agency heads caps off a decades-long conservative push to strengthen the president’s grip on key levers of government power.
Monday’s 6-3 ruling, powered by the court’s conservatives, determined that a president can remove agency officials who wield executive power, such as Democratic Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, whose firing was upheld despite removal protections provided in law by Congress.
The court, however, signaled that the decision should not be seen as undermining the Federal Reserve’s independence. The justices described the U.S. central bank as possessing a unique historical tradition, and in a separate case on Monday refused to let Trump fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
Legal experts said the FTC ruling dealt a crippling blow to the so-called “administrative state.” That refers to the network of federal agencies that regulate key aspects of American life and business, from finance to air traffic safety to labor relations, and had been largely insulated from direct presidential control.
The decision is also seen as the high-water mark for the “unitary executive” theory, a conservative legal doctrine popularized during the presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that had made steady inroads with like-minded justices. That theory sees the president as having sole authority over the U.S. government’s executive branch, including the power to fire and replace heads of federal agencies at will.
The court bolstered presidential power at a time when Trump has tested the limits of his authority in both domestic and foreign affairs.
‘NEARLY A NULLITY’
University of North Carolina School of Law professor Michael Gerhardt said Monday’s FTC ruling marked “the most significant decision expanding presidential power in decades.”
“This is definitely the biggest win yet for the unitary theory of the executive,” Gerhardt said, calling it “the culmination of years of planning by conservative groups.”
“The administrative state,” Gerhardt added, “just shrank to nearly a nullity.”
According to John Yoo, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, the ruling gives the president control over an administrative state that was primarily created and expanded by Democratic former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama.
“The presidency just gained the most constitutional power, at any one time, in Slaughter than in any other single case in Supreme Court history,” Yoo said, referring to the case by its name, Trump v. Slaughter. “There is no more independent administrative state.”
Slaughter, appointed by Democratic former President Joe Biden, was one of two Democratic FTC commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March 2025 from the consumer protection and antitrust agency. Slaughter’s term was due to run until 2029.
In a legal challenge to her removal, Slaughter cited a 1914 law that allowed a president to remove FTC commissioners only for cause — such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office — but not for policy differences. Similar protections have covered officials at more than two dozen other independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.
A PRECEDENT OVERTURNED
Lower courts that reviewed Slaughter’s claim upheld these tenure protections for FTC members under a 1935 Supreme Court decision in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that recognized congressional authority to protect leaders of certain regulatory agencies from presidential removal at will.
The court in the Humphrey’s Executor decision rebuffed Roosevelt’s attempt to fire an FTC member over policy differences despite the tenure protections given by Congress. In that decision, the court said restricting a president’s removal of commissioners was lawful because the FTC performed tasks more closely resembling legislative and judicial functions rather than those belonging squarely to the executive branch, headed by the president.
The Trump administration had argued that the modern FTC grew to wield substantial executive power in the decades since the Humphrey’s Executor decision, draining that ruling of its force.
The court in Monday’s decision agreed, overruling Humphrey’s Executor. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
The Supreme Court in recent decades had narrowed the reach of Humphrey’s Executor but stopped short of overturning it. In a 2020 ruling, it said the Constitution’s Article II gives the president the general power to remove heads of agencies at will but that the 1935 precedent had carved out an exception that allowed for-cause removal protections for certain multi-member, expert agencies.
Christine Chabot, a professor at Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin, said, “The court’s decision to overrule Humphrey’s Executor is the biggest win to date for the ‘unitary executive’ theory.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley Law School, said he expects Monday’s ruling overruling Humphrey’s will lead to further politicization of federal regulatory agencies that Congress sought to entrust to nonpartisan experts.
“I think agency independence is now gone,” Chemerinsky said. “Agencies, like cabinet departments, will need to do what the president wants.”
The likely outcome will be broader swings in regulatory policy when the presidential administration of one political party replaces the other party.
University of Illinois Chicago law professor Steve Schwinn, who criticized the ruling, said he expects it will result in the “hyper-politicization of previously independent federal agencies.”
“I fear that we as a people won’t fully appreciate the impacts for years or decades,” Schwinn said.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
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