The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that President Donald Trump had the authority to fire Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning the nearly century-old Humphrey's Executor precedent and restoring a constitutional principle that presidents of both parties have sought to reclaim since the 1930s.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for all six conservative justices, grounded the decision squarely in the separation of powers. The majority found that the FTC's statutory provision allowing commissioners to be removed only "for cause", defined as inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance, violates the Constitution's structure.

"The President may remove his subordinates at will," Roberts wrote. "The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive."

A constitutional correction decades in the making

The ruling traces back to a fight that began in March 2025, when Trump fired Slaughter and fellow Democratic Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya without citing cause. Trump said their continued service was inconsistent with his administration's priorities. Both commissioners sued, seeking reinstatement.

Bedoya resigned from the FTC in June 2025 and dropped his case. Slaughter pressed on, and lost.

The path to Monday's decision was not a single leap. The Washington Examiner noted that the Supreme Court had twice before allowed Trump's agency firings to proceed on its emergency docket before issuing this full merits ruling. The pattern was clear well before the final opinion dropped.

Roberts's majority opinion went further than the immediate case required. As he wrote: "Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President... he and he alone is vested with the executive Power of the United States. Neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work."

That language does not leave much room for ambiguity. The president runs the executive branch. Officials who exercise executive power serve at his pleasure. The 1935 precedent that said otherwise was wrong, and the Court said so plainly.

What Humphrey's Executor actually did

For readers unfamiliar with the original case, Humphrey's Executor v. United States arose when President Franklin Roosevelt fired a Federal Trade Commissioner who disagreed with New Deal policies. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1935 that Congress could insulate certain agency officials from presidential removal, creating the legal architecture for what became known as "independent agencies."

That architecture allowed a class of unelected officials to wield enormous regulatory power, over markets, over businesses, over the daily economic lives of Americans, while remaining largely beyond the reach of the one official voters actually choose to lead the executive branch. For nearly nine decades, that arrangement stood. Monday, it fell.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion, captured the point with characteristic directness: "Independent agencies are not so independent after all."

The decision arrives during a term in which the Court has repeatedly reinforced executive authority. In recent weeks, the justices delivered significant wins for Trump on asylum and Temporary Protected Status, continuing a pattern of restoring constitutional boundaries that prior courts had allowed to erode.

The dissent and the Democratic reaction

Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissent joined by the Court's other liberal members. Her language was sharp.

"Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice. The Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted."

Sotomayor argued the case "should have begun and ended with this Court's unanimous decision from almost a century ago: Humphrey's Executor." She accused the majority of forgetting "its place" and reshaping the government.

The comparison to the English Crown is vivid rhetoric, but it inverts the actual constitutional design. The Founders did not revolt against executive authority, they revolted against a monarch who governed without democratic accountability. The president, unlike a king, faces voters every four years. The FTC commissioners Sotomayor sought to protect face no voters at all.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a statement calling the ruling "an affront to good governance and the point of 'independent' federal agencies in the first place." He added that Trump can now "fire whomever he perceives as his enemy at these agencies without so much as citing cause."

That framing, "enemy", tells you something about how the opposition sees executive management. A president replacing officials whose policy views conflict with his own is not persecution. It is how democratic accountability is supposed to work.

The political reaction followed a familiar script. When the Court handed Trump 6-3 victories on TPS and asylum earlier this term, Democrats responded with similar alarm. The pattern suggests the objection is less about constitutional principle and more about losing a particular arrangement that benefited the administrative class.

Slaughter responds, and reveals the real concern

Slaughter herself appeared on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" after the ruling. Her comments were revealing, not for what they said about the Constitution, but for what they said about the assumptions underlying the "independent agency" model.

"I think what matters is exactly what President Trump said: it is unprecedented and it takes a massive amount of power away from Congress, and to the president to shape economic decision-making in a way that will reward the rich and powerful, and at the expense of ordinary Americans."

She went further, warning that agency decision-making would become political and could "reward political and campaign contributions, friends and allies of the president, rather than being decisions that are made on the merits."

The implication is that unelected commissioners, appointed through a political process, confirmed by a political body, serving fixed terms that insulate them from the voters, were somehow making apolitical decisions. Anyone who has watched the FTC over the past decade knows better. The question was never whether these agencies would be political. The question was whether the political actor accountable to voters would have any say in the matter.

Monday's ruling answered yes.

The Federal Reserve carve-out

Roberts took care to note that the ruling should not be read as reaching the Federal Reserve. "Our opinion today should not be read" as affecting the Fed's structure, he wrote, a deliberate hedge that leaves the central bank's independence intact for now.

That carve-out will draw scrutiny. Trump previously attempted to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. In a separate ruling issued the same Monday, the Court said Cook could remain on the job pending the outcome of her lawsuit challenging her termination, which will proceed in a federal district court.

Fox News reported that legal scholars expect the ruling to extend well beyond the FTC to other independent agencies, with the Fed potentially being the only exception. Joshua Blackman of South Texas College of Law told the network: "I think this ruling will necessarily reach beyond the FTC. The only question is whether they maintain that the Federal Reserve is different."

That question will define the next chapter of this legal fight. But the principle established Monday is clear: agencies that exercise executive power answer to the executive.

A broader pattern at the Court

This term has seen the Supreme Court reassert structural constitutional limits with unusual consistency. The FTC ruling follows a 2020 decision allowing the president to fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at will. The New York Post noted that the Court previously paved the way for Trump to fire three members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in July 2025, establishing a clear pattern of expanding presidential removal authority.

The trajectory is unmistakable. Brick by brick, the Court is dismantling the legal scaffolding that allowed a vast regulatory apparatus to operate beyond meaningful presidential oversight. Whether one calls that apparatus the "administrative state" or simply "the way Washington works," the justices appear untroubled by the disruption.

Conservatives who have watched the Court's conservative justices push for structural reform across multiple areas will recognize the through-line. The principle is straightforward: the Constitution means what it says, and arrangements that contradict it, however long they have persisted, do not acquire legitimacy through age alone.

What comes next

The ruling raises questions the Court did not fully resolve. Which other agencies fall under its reach? How will the Federal Reserve carve-out hold up when Cook's case reaches its merits? Will Congress attempt to legislate new protections for agency officials, and would those protections survive judicial review under the framework Roberts established?

For now, the practical effect is immediate. Trump posted on Truth Social: "To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!"

Democrats will frame this as a power grab. But the power in question, the authority of a president to manage the people who work for him, is not new. It is original. It was written into Article II. It was taken away by a Depression-era Court eager to accommodate FDR's expansion of federal authority, and it has now been returned.

AP News reported that Slaughter's attorneys had warned the decision would have "seismic implications for our economy." Solicitor General D. John Sauer countered that "the President and the government suffer irreparable harm when courts transfer even some of that executive power to officers beyond the President's control."

The Court agreed with Sauer. Six justices looked at the constitutional text, looked at the 1935 precedent, and concluded the precedent was wrong. That is not radicalism. That is correction.

For decades, Washington built a system where unelected officials could wield enormous power while answering to no one the voters could reach. Monday, the Supreme Court reminded everyone that the Constitution never authorized that arrangement, and the people who designed it knew exactly what they were doing.