A nearly century-old precedent that has been in conservatives’ cross-hairs for years met its demise Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled to limit the independence of agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that heads of multimember agencies could be dismissed by presidential discretion, without citing a particular “cause.” The case centered on President Donald Trump’s decision last year to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic nominee from her position on the Federal Trade Commission.
The highly anticipated ruling in Trump v. Slaughter reversed the court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which restricted the president’s power to dismiss heads of multimember agencies like FERC except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The ruling delivers more power to the executive branch, potentially giving Trump — and his successors — the authority to fire members of agencies that regulate the transmission of electricity, gas, oil and nuclear power.
It’s the latest Supreme Court victory for Trump, who has sought to restrict the authority of federal agencies involved in energy matters. The move, Trump exalted on TruthSocial, is “ greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!”
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried the decision, saying “Trump’s MAGA Supreme Court just gave him a permission slip to turn independent federal agencies into members-only clubs for his golf buddies and cronies.”
To carry out his duties, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”
Roberts noted that although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm a president’s nominees, “neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work.”
He added, “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.”
Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Roberts, along with Justice Neil Gorsuch, who filed a concurring opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas joined, but for part of the opinion.
The court’s liberal justices disagreed, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor arguing that some government functions — including nuclear energy — should be above the partisan fray.
She noted in a dissent that independent federal agencies have been established to ensure areas such as nuclear energy, the monetary supply and chemical hazards could “operate at a distance from partisan politics.”
The new ruling, she said, “gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches.”
Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, predicted that “dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.”
That includes, she wrote, FERC, which has responsibility for managing the nation’s energy supply, along with the Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical disasters, as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“It’s an extraordinarily consequential decision about the reach of presidential power, because agencies that had a degree of independence from the president no longer do,” said Joel Eisen, a law professor at the University of Richmond. He noted that although the decision involved upholding the firing of a FTC commissioner, “its practical reach is that there is no longer any legal doctrine stopping a president from removing any member of FERC if it were to do anything with which that president disagreed.”
But Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, noted the ruling does not explicitly end the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s for-cause removal protections.
It remains to be seen, he said, whether a president fires a FERC commissioner and whether the commissioner litigates the firing.
Gorsuch sounded a note of caution in his concurrence, asking whether Congress would have granted so much power to the independent agencies had it known the president would “come to control them.”
He argued that agencies now hold “tremendous sway over the nation’s affairs,” including “how we light our homes.”
And he said agencies have not hesitated to employ power, citing the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Biden-era decision to require climate change disclosures for companies. The SEC has since proposed ending the requirement.
The ruling increases the risk that FERC commissioners will yield to political pressure from the White House and be more inclined to override sound economic judgments with more partisan and less expert policymaking, said Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School.
“Remember that in the president’s first term, FERC resisted the president’s efforts to favor coal when overseeing energy markets to ensure they are competitive. [I] strongly doubt that would happen again,” she said.
Proponents of further consolidating executive power heralded the court’s ruling.
The ruling was a great decision from originalism and made clear that Article II vests all executive power in the president, said Margot Cleveland, of counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
It would be interesting to see if Congress will try to reclaim some of its authority from federal agencies and limit executive power after this decision, she said.
“The problem is [Congress] granted these agencies so much power, that now that we have Trump in charge, he’s able to make these decisions,” she said.
The Supreme Court did issue a separate ruling Monday rejecting Trump’s efforts to remove a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, Lisa Cook. The agency has broad power over the nation’s financial system.
In that opinion, Roberts wrote Trump “failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute.” Without such protections, he wrote, Cook “could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her.”
He said the court did not have to take up Cook’s constitutional due process argument, because the law “alone makes it unlikely that the government will prevail on appeal as to the validity of the procedures used to fire Cook.”
Critics of overturning Humphrey’s Executor have warned that giving the president broader authority to remove heads of independent agencies risked politicizing highly technical decision-making, like regulating utility rates or approving new energy projects.
“Today’s ruling fundamentally remakes our government by judicial fiat, preventing Congress from designing our government to value consensus and expertise over pure partisanship,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.
Stier argued that Congress created bodies like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to function through deliberation: multimember bodies representing different political parties, often appointed by different presidents so that no single political actor could dictate their decisions.
“Without the guarantee of independence, boards and commission members will now make decisions under the constant threat of politically motivated removal,” Stier said.
But in its majority decision, the court echoed the Trump administration’s claims that Humphrey’s Executor undercut the power given to the president in the Constitution to remove agency heads who use “executive power on his behalf.”
Roberts wrote that “at this point, all that is left of Humphrey’s is its observation that an agency that ‘exercises no part of the executive power’ need not fall within the rule of presidential removal.”
He added, “if anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”
The court’s liberal minority embraced the claims of Rebecca Slaughter, who had been removed from her position on the Federal Trade Commission at the start of the second Trump administration. She had argued that it should be up to Congress, and not the courts, to address any concerns about the president’s removal powers.
Slaughter was among several independent agency heads to face dismissal at the start of Trump’s second term.
The president had also fired members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Notably, the high court declined to take a similar position when it came to Cook’s high-profile dismissal at the Federal Reserve. The administration alleged Cook misrepresented information on mortgage documents prior to her employment on the board of governors.
A federal district court in Washington had ruled in 2025 that Cook could remain in office while litigation over her removal is ongoing, after finding the rationale for Cook’s dismissal was inadequate. A split appeals court declined to overturn the decision, prompting the Trump administration to appeal to the Supreme Court’s emergency or shadow docket.
During oral arguments, more than one justice questioned whether gross negligence before taking office could be considered sufficient to show cause for removal from a post.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) welcomed the Cook decision, which allows her to keep her position on the board while litigation proceeds.
Bonta said the court held that Trump’s “stubborn attempts” to remove Cook without cause are “beyond his authority and unlawful.”
He called it a “win for the Federal Reserve’s institutional independence.”
