The United States Supreme Court issued what may be its most consequential administrative-law ruling in nearly a century on Monday, striking down the ninety-one-year-old precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor, which had shielded commissioners of independent regulatory agencies from at-will presidential removal. By a 6-3 margin, the Court ruled that President Trump’s March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commission commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter — dismissed by email simply because her “continued service is inconsistent with this Administration’s priorities” — was entirely lawful. In a separate, narrower 5-4 ruling issued the same day, however, the Court blocked Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, preserving at least a partial zone of independence for the central bank. Together the two decisions redraw the constitutional map of the executive branch in ways that will outlast the current administration by generations.
The received wisdom
The standard liberal framing treats this ruling as a straightforward power grab by a rogue president using a captured court. The concern is genuine and not paranoid: Trump has already fired Democratic commissioners from the FTC, leaving only Republicans, and the FTC alone enforces roughly eighty statutes covering nearly every facet of the American economy. Extend the logic, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission — all of them become, in effect, partisan instruments of whichever party occupies the White House.
For those who built their careers within this regulatory architecture, the argument for independence is intuitive. These are expert bodies, the thinking goes, insulated from electoral pressure precisely because sound financial regulation and consumer protection should be conducted on the merits, not calibrated to the president’s approval ratings. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent captured this view forcefully, accusing the majority of giving the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.” That is not mere rhetoric. She is pointing to something constitutionally serious.
A different read
Yet the Sotomayor framing, while emotionally satisfying, runs into a structural problem that conservatives have been pressing for decades, and that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion finally resolves. The Constitution distributes executive power to one person. It does not distribute it to a diffuse constellation of independent commissions staffed by commissioners whom the president cannot remove, cannot instruct, and cannot be held accountable for — yet who exercise coercive power over private citizens. As Roberts put it, “neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work.” The principle is not that the president’s preferences should determine regulatory outcomes. It is that democratic accountability requires a traceable chain of authority from the voter to the official who acts in the voter’s name.
Humphrey’s Executor was itself a product of a peculiar moment. Franklin Roosevelt had tried to fire an FTC commissioner over ideological disagreements; the unanimous 1935 Court, determined to preserve some institutional space from FDR’s accumulating power, invented a distinction between “purely executive” officers and those performing “quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial” functions. The distinction was always philosophically shaky — any enforcement action by any regulator is, in some sense, an exercise of executive power — and subsequent decades of administrative-law scholarship quietly acknowledged as much. What Humphrey’s created was not genuine independence but rather a diffusion of accountability: agencies that could act with coercive force while remaining politically orphaned, responsible to nobody in particular.
The practical counter-argument matters, of course. If every commissioner can be fired the moment a new administration dislikes their enforcement priorities, regulatory consistency collapses. Businesses cannot plan; long-term investigations are abandoned; consumer protection becomes cyclical. This is a real cost. But the answer is not to exempt regulators from democratic accountability altogether. Congress retains the power to write statutes that define agency mandates narrowly and precisely, reducing the discretion that makes politicisation dangerous in the first place. The malaise is not that the president can fire commissioners — it is that Congress has delegated so much open-ended power that whoever controls the commission controls vast swaths of economic life. Fix the delegation; don’t insulate the delegate.
The geofence warrant ruling issued the same day, written by Justice Elena Kagan for a 6-3 majority, points toward a more nuanced court than the partisan tribalists on either side wish to acknowledge. The justices restricted law enforcement’s ability to compel tech companies to search their entire user-location databases on the basis of proximity to a crime scene — a genuine civil-liberties victory that cut across the usual ideological lines. Likewise, the 5-4 retention of the Federal Reserve’s insulation from presidential removal, on the specific grounds that the Fed does not wield “executive power” in the conventional sense, carves out an important space. The court is not simply handing Trump a blank cheque; it is attempting, unevenly and imperfectly, to draw constitutional lines that have long been blurred.
The deeper issue the ruling exposes is the eighty-year accumulation of the administrative state — entities created by Congress because legislating in detail is hard, and because diffusing accountability is politically convenient. Both parties have exploited this arrangement: Democrats built regulatory agencies to advance progressive goals while insulating them from Republican presidents; Republicans used them to entrench business-friendly rules while insulating them from Democratic ones. What the Roberts court has now done, arguably with some constitutional warrant, is force the question back to its proper location: if you want a rule enforced, get a Congress to write it.
What to watch
Watch whether the FTC’s bipartisan-composition requirement — mandating no party hold more than three of five seats — survives in practice now that commissioners can be fired at will. Congress could theoretically reassert itself through legislation explicitly prohibiting partisan stacking, though the current majority seems unlikely to try.
The Lisa Cook carve-out deserves close attention. The 5-4 reasoning distinguishing the Fed from other independent agencies will be litigated extensively. If the lower courts find insufficient cause to remove Cook, does the administration comply? The Fed’s de facto independence rests not on a strong constitutional foundation but on credibility and convention — both fragile things.
Watch also whether Congress, stung by the ruling’s implications, begins reclaiming delegated authority through more precisely drafted statutes. That would be the constitutionally healthy response. Do not bet heavily on it.
— J