The U.S. Supreme Court signaled Monday that it may expand presidential authority over independent federal agencies, agreeing to review a 90-year-old precedent that restricts when board members can be removed.
In the meantime, the justices cleared the way for President Donald Trump to dismiss Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, while the case proceeds. The 6-3 ruling reflects a trend in recent months where the conservative majority has consistently backed Trump in disputes over agency leadership.
The dispute centers on a 1935 decision known as Humphrey’s Executor, which held that presidents could only remove commissioners of independent agencies for misconduct or neglect of duty. That ruling helped entrench powerful regulators such as the FTC, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
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Trump’s Justice Department argues that those limits improperly tie the president’s hands. “The President and the government suffer irreparable harm when courts transfer even some of that executive power to officers beyond the President’s control,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. He added that courts can only award back pay, not reinstate fired officials.
Slaughter’s attorneys countered that such a shift would politicize regulatory decisions. “If the President is to be given new powers Congress has expressly and repeatedly refused to give him, that decision should come from the people’s elected representatives,” they said.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the majority for allowing the firing before the case is fully argued. “Congress, as everyone agrees, prohibited each of those presidential removals,” Kagan wrote. “Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President.”
The justices will hear oral arguments in December, far earlier than usual in the appeals process. The ruling could determine the future independence of federal regulators that oversee consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, labor practices, and the federal workforce.
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In the interim, the court has also permitted Trump to remove two other agency officials, Gwynne Wilcox of the NLRB and Cathy Harris of the MSPB, while their cases proceed in lower courts. A challenge involving Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is expected to test whether the central bank will be treated differently.
