Nearly a dozen former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking that it preserve FERC independence from the White House.
The brief argues to keep the century-old practice of Congress delegating regulatory power to bipartisan commissions whose members serve terms and are independent from the White House. Under the 1935 high court ruling Humphrey’s Executor, independent regulators were given some protection from being fired without cause by the president.
“Overturning Humphrey’s Executor would bulldoze the structural supports that Congress built into ratemaking commissions to protect its price-setting power from abuse,” the brief reads. “By shielding agency action from political control, for-cause removal protections allow ratemaking commissions to sustain stable policies for the long-term benefit of regulated companies and American consumers.”
The brief was submitted to the docket for Trump v. Slaughter, in which the president is urging the court to allow him to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a former member of the Federal Trade Commission. Under Humphrey’s Executor, the president is only allowed to fire independent agency commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance” because those agencies exercise “quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers.”
