Supreme Court overrules Humphrey's Executor in Trump v. Slaughter

On 29 June 2026 the Supreme Court held 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter, No. 25-332, that the Federal Trade Commission Act’s for-cause removal provision at 15 U.S.C. § 41 — permitting removal of FTC commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” — is contrary to the separation of powers, and overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), the 91-year-old precedent that had upheld the same provision.¹² Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts reasoned that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. 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.”³ Because “the FTC unquestionably exercises executive power” — enforcing “some 80 statutes,” adjudicating in-house and filing “civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court” — the commission “must therefore be controlled by the” President; of Humphrey’s Executor, Roberts wrote, “all that is left … is its observation that an agency that ‘exercises no part of the executive power’ need not fall within the rule of Presidential removal.”³ Justice Gorsuch filed a 16-page solo concurrence urging the Court “to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts.” Justice Sotomayor’s 49-page dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, said the majority “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted” and that the decision “reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies” — naming the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Merit Systems Protection Board.³ The case reached the Court from President Trump’s March 2025 removal of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter — told in a White House letter that her continued service would be “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities,” and removed alongside Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya — after Judge Loren AliKhan of the District of Columbia ordered her reinstatement on 17 July 2025 (No. 1:25-cv-909). A divided D.C. Circuit panel declined a stay on 2 September 2025 (Millett and Pillard, JJ., in the majority; Rao, J., dissenting), treating Humphrey’s Executor as resolving the question; the Chief Justice entered an administrative stay on 8 September 2025, and on 22 September 2025 the full Court granted the stay and — treating the application as a petition for certiorari before judgment under Supreme Court Rule 11 — granted review, over a dissent by Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, setting argument for 8 December 2025.⁴

1. The holding converts approximately two dozen multi-member agencies structured on the Humphrey’s Executor model into at-will presidential territory, subject to the opinion’s carve-outs: Roberts wrote that “not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive or even sovereign power attached” and that “some functions traditionally handled outside the Executive Branch” — naming the Federal Reserve, “to the extent that it follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States—both of which influenced monetary policy and neither of which were subject to plenary Presidential control” — sit outside the removal rule.³ The Fed carve-out operated the same day: the Court denied the government’s application to displace Governor Lisa Cook in Supreme Court leaves Fed Governor Cook in place.

2. The decision completes the arc that Executive Order 14215 of 18 February 2025 began by subjecting independent regulatory agencies to OMB and OIRA supervision (see EO 14215 places independent agencies under presidential review); with removal protection gone, the distinction between “independent” and executive agencies for the roughly two dozen multi-member commissions now rests on statutes’ partisan-balance and staggered-term requirements, which the opinion does not disturb, rather than on tenure protection.⁵

3. The precedential path ran through the Court’s interim orders of 2025 — Trump v. Wilcox (National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, order of 22 May 2025), Trump v. Boyle (Consumer Product Safety Commission, order of 23 July 2025) and the Slaughter stay itself — which had allowed removals while appeals proceeded; Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, 591 U.S. 197 (2020), had confined Humphrey’s Executor to multi-member bodies not exercising substantial executive power, and Slaughter now discards the remainder for agencies that do.⁶⁷