Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC members

By Andrew Rice
The Center Square

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision on Monday, allowed President Donald Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

Trump fired Slaughter in March 2025. Under federal law, members of the FTC can only be fired for a certain cause, but Trump did not include a cause.

Justices on the high court said Trump had the authority to fire members of the FTC because they exercised control over the president. Chief Justice John Roberts said the actions of the FTC must remain accountable to the president.

“These officers were to serve as envoys of the President, not his equals. They ‘ought to be considered as the assistants or deputies of the Chief Magistrate,'” Roberts wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

The court’s decision is a departure from its ruling Monday in Trump v. Cook, where the majority of justices agreed the president does not have the right to fire members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

Justices in the majority opinion on the high court drew a clear distinction between their beliefs on executive authority over various departments.

“All the Court does today is recognize what has been clear for a century – that those who fall within the President’s ‘general administrative control’ must be removable by the President at will,” Roberts wrote.

The court’s decision overturns precedent formed in Humphreys v. United States, a case where the Supreme Court prevented President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from firing a member of the FTC. Roberts said the decision has not “withstood the test of time.”

“Despite what Humphrey’s may say, independent agencies are not ‘independent’ in the sense that they are free of the President and thus responsive ‘only to the people of the United States,'” Roberts wrote.

Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino stated in a post on X about the Slaughter decision:

“Humphrey’s Executor has been executed! … Or should I say Slaughtered? This is a huge win for the administration, returning the constitutional authority over the executive branch to the President,” Severino wrote. “It’s important to remember that, while this helps Trump right now, it means all future presidents of either party will have the power the Constitution gives them to exercise authority over the executive branch. We’re used to cabinet members changing with each new administration, and now other agencies will function the same way.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan disagreed with the court’s majority opinion. Sotomayor said allowing the president to fire members of the FTC gives him elevated power over agencies Congress was meant to control.

“The Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws,” Sotomayor wrote.

Trump fired Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya last year without stating a cause. Both members of the FTC were Democratic appointees to the board.

John Malcom, vice president of Advancing American Freedom’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, also praised the decision, saying in a statement provided to The Center Square that “the Court finally overturned its misguided 1935 opinion in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and has now vindicated the president’s ability to remove executive branch officials whom the president does not trust to fully implement his policies. Congress’s attempts to restrict the ability of presidents to remove the heads of so-called independent agencies unconstitutionally infringed upon the Executive power that is vested solely in the president under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling in Trump’s favor could shape how he approaches the makeup of other executive agencies like the FTC throughout the remainder of his administration. Trump celebrated the ruling in a social media post on Monday.

“This Decision was long sought by United States Presidents, dating all the way back to the 1930s,” Trump wrote. “It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”