Tuesday Capitol Hill — The Court Buries Humphrey’s Executor and Hands Trump the Power to Fire the Watchdogs
In a 6–3 decision that will outlast this presidency, the Supreme Court has overturned Humphrey’s Executor, the 90-year-old precedent that shielded the heads of independent agencies from being fired at the President’s whim. The ruling upholds Donald Trump’s removal of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter and, with her, the principle that some corners of the federal government were meant to be insulated from the man in the Oval Office. Washington spent Tuesday absorbing what it means to live without a rule that has defined the bureaucracy since 1935.
The Precedent That Held for Ninety Years
Decided unanimously in 1935, Humphrey’s Executor told a different president — Franklin Roosevelt — that he could not fire an FTC commissioner simply because he disagreed with him. From that single case grew an entire architecture of independence: regulators with fixed terms, removable only “for cause,” designed so that the agencies policing markets, labor and consumer safety would answer to law rather than to the politics of the moment. That architecture is what the Court has now dismantled, ruling that officials who wield the President’s executive power must ultimately be removable by him.
What Roberts Wrote
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the decision as a matter of accountability rather than power. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him,” he wrote; only then can they “remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.” The Senate, he allowed, may still refuse to confirm nominees a president wants — but neither Congress nor the courts may “saddle him with those with whom he cannot work.” It is a clean theory of the unitary executive, and it leaves the political checks on agency staffing entirely in the hands of confirmation fights the President’s party can often win.
The Fed Exception — and Why It Matters
The most consequential line in the ruling may be the one carving out an exception. The justices declined to let Trump remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, signaling that the central bank’s independence rests on a different and sturdier footing than that of ordinary regulators. The message to markets was deliberate: the Court was willing to expand presidential control over the bureaucracy, but not to put the institution that sets interest rates within reach of the same power. It is a carve-out that quietly concedes the stakes — an admission that some independence is too dangerous to surrender, even as the rest is swept away.
The Agencies Now in Play
The decision’s reach extends far beyond the FTC. The same logic now hangs over the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a long list of bodies where Trump has already dismissed members appointed by his predecessors. Each was built on the assumption that “for cause” meant something; each now operates at the President’s pleasure. For the officials still serving, the ruling is less a legal abstraction than a job notice.
Congress’s Move, If It Has One
The dissent, and the Democrats who spent Tuesday denouncing the decision, framed it as an invitation to Congress to legislate new protections. But that invitation runs into the same wall every check on this presidency has hit: a narrow majority, a crowded calendar already consumed by the war-powers fight, and a White House with little reason to sign away the authority the Court has just handed it. For now, the practical consequence is simple and large. The agencies designed to be a brake on the executive have become, by a single 6–3 vote, extensions of it — and the next president, of either party, will inherit a government built to obey.