Facts of the Case
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was serving as a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency led by five commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to seven-year terms. The Federal Trade Commission Act limits the President’s ability to remove an FTC Commissioner to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” President Donald J. Trump fired Commissioner Slaughter, explaining her continued service was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities,” which did not meet the statutory standard of “cause.” Slaughter sued President Trump and the three remaining FTC Commissioners, arguing her removal was unlawful because the President failed to offer a statutory cause.
The district court ruled in favor of Commissioner Slaughter, declaring her removal unlawful, ordering her reinstatement, and issuing a permanent injunction against the remaining Commissioners and their subordinates, barring them from interfering with her duties. The government appealed the decision and requested a stay of the district court's order pending the appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal and dissolved an administrative stay that had been previously entered. The Supreme Court granted the stay on September 22, 2025, and also granted certiorari.
Questions
Do the statutory removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers?
Conclusions
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The statutory “for-cause” removal protection for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioners — limiting the President to removing them only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office — violates the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution, and the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that had upheld that protection is overruled. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 majority opinion, joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and by Justice Clarence Thomas as to all but the section reserving questions about edge cases.
Article II vests all executive power in a single President and charges him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That design creates a command hierarchy: the President bears ultimate responsibility for executing the law, and those who carry out executive power beneath him are his subordinates, not his equals. For that hierarchy to function, the President must be able to remove subordinates at will — at any time, for any reason. A President who cannot remove the officers executing the law in his name cannot be held accountable for their conduct, which would collapse the Constitution’s promise of democratic responsibility. That understanding was settled by the First Congress in the “Decision of 1789” and confirmed a century ago in Myers v. United States (1926), which held that the President holds general administrative control over those who execute the laws, including the unfettered power to fire them.
Humphrey’s Executor had carved out an exception for the FTC by characterizing its functions as “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” rather than executive, reasoning that those hybrid functions did not require direct presidential control. But subsequent decisions recognized that those labels cannot bear the weight placed on them: when an agency makes binding rules carrying the force of law, investigates and prosecutes private parties through in-house adjudications, and files civil suits on behalf of the United States — as today’s FTC does across more than 80 statutes — it exercises executive power, full stop. Every factor relevant to respecting prior decisions counsels overruling Humphrey’s: its core reasoning was flawed from the start, it is inconsistent with decades of later case law, its rule proved unworkable, and Congress’s reliance on it to construct independent agencies does not count as legitimate because no branch can accumulate by practice power the Constitution places elsewhere.
Justice Gorsuch concurred, agreeing with the holding but writing separately to warn that, because Congress delegated vast legislative and judicial powers to independent agencies precisely in reliance on their independence from the President, today’s decision effectively concentrates all those powers in presidential hands — a development that raises its own serious separation-of-powers concerns that the Court’s existing doctrines (non-delegation, major questions, Article III) may need to address.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing that neither the Constitution’s text nor its history supports an absolute at-will removal power, that Humphrey’s Executor was correctly decided and consistently reaffirmed for nearly a century, that 140 years of congressional and presidential practice confirm Congress may grant independent agencies modest removal protections, and that the doctrine of stare decisis — respect for prior decisions — should have been decisive given the enormous reliance interests at stake across dozens of agencies that now stand transformed.
From the Courthouse Steps: Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC)...
