The Supreme Court delivered President Donald Trump one of the most significant victories of his second term Monday, overturning 91 years of precedent and ruling that the president has broad authority to fire the heads of independent federal agencies at will.
It is a decision that fundamentally reshapes the balance of power between the White House and the sprawling federal bureaucracy that Trump has called the “Deep State.”
In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump’s March 2025 firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter was lawful, formally overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States — the 1935 ruling that had shielded the heads of multi-member independent agencies from removal except “for cause.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, with Justice Thomas joining all but one section. Gorsuch filed a separate concurring opinion.
“Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one president,” Roberts wrote. “Subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the president, and the president to the people.”
The ruling effectively guts what remained of Humphrey’s Executor, a precedent the Court had already been narrowing for years. As the majority opinion put it bluntly: “When an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power — no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, warning the ruling hands future presidents of either party unchecked authority over agencies Congress deliberately designed to operate free from political pressure.
“Today, the Court discards that democratic regime in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control,” Sotomayor wrote. “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before.”
The effect extends well beyond the FTC. The same legal reasoning applies to the heads of numerous other agencies Congress structured with similar for-cause removal protections, including bodies overseeing numerous regulations. Trump’s administration has already moved to fire officials at several of those agencies, and Monday’s ruling forecloses the primary legal argument that had been used to challenge those removals.
The president’s win came with one notable carve-out. In a companion case decided the same day, Trump v. Cook, the Court ruled 5-4 — with the three liberal justices crossing over to join Roberts and Kavanaugh — that Trump could not remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
Trump had moved to fire Cook in August 2025 over mortgage fraud allegations raised by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. Roberts wrote that stripping Cook’s for-cause protection would effectively convert her position “into at-will employment,” a result he called “out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”