The Supreme Court on Monday handed President Donald Trump a significant victory, ruling 6-3 that expands presidential authority over independent federal agencies by overturning a 91-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to shield certain executive branch officials from being removed by the president.
The decision formally overturns the Supreme Court’s landmark 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which established that Congress could provide certain officials serving on independent agencies with protections against being fired by the president. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, declared that precedent no longer stands.
“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Roberts wrote.
The ruling gives Trump the authority to remove Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee whose case became central to the administration’s effort to eliminate limits on the president’s removal power.
The decision marks a substantial expansion of presidential authority over the executive branch and is expected to have broad implications beyond the Federal Trade Commission. Roughly two dozen multimember agencies across the federal government could now be affected, allowing future presidents greater freedom to appoint officials who align with their policy priorities.
Those agencies oversee a wide range of responsibilities touching everyday American life, including labor disputes, workplace discrimination, federal employee rights, credit unions, product recalls, and investigations into plane accidents, among other regulatory duties.
Legal conservatives have long argued that the Humphrey’s Executor precedent violated the Constitution’s separation of powers by limiting the president’s authority over executive branch officials. In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had already narrowed the scope of the 1935 decision through a series of rulings before Monday’s decision fully overturned it.
President Trump celebrated the ruling shortly after it was issued, posting on Truth Social that presidents had sought such a decision since the 1930s.
“This Decision was long sought by United States Presidents, dating all the way back to the 1930s. It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers,” Trump wrote.
After returning to the White House, Trump positioned the issue for Supreme Court review by dismissing heads of several independent agencies despite statutory protections that limited when they could be removed. Those officials generally prevailed in lower courts, which remained bound by the Supreme Court’s 1935 precedent. The Supreme Court, however, has the authority to overturn its own prior decisions.
The origins of the case trace directly back to the Federal Trade Commission itself.
In Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could prevent presidents from removing leaders of agencies that perform what the court described as “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” functions. That decision blocked President Franklin D. Roosevelt from dismissing an FTC commissioner who did not support his New Deal agenda.
For decades, Congress has limited a president’s ability to remove FTC commissioners, allowing dismissal only in cases involving “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Trump dismissed Rebecca Slaughter last year after she had initially been appointed to a Democratic seat on the commission in 2018. Former President Joe Biden later renominated her to another term scheduled to expire in 2029.
Rather than citing the statutory grounds established by Congress, Trump said Slaughter’s continued service would be “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities,” a move that ultimately helped bring the constitutional dispute before the Supreme Court.
[READ MORE: Trump Has Power To Fire Executive Office Officials]
