Supreme Court expands Trump’s power to fire agency leaders

The Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major expansion of presidential power on Monday, allowing him to fire Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause and stripping away a 1935 safeguard that had limited at-will removals at some independent agencies. The 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter immediately shifted the legal balance toward the White House and away from Congress’s long effort to insulate regulators from direct presidential control.

The decision overruled Humphrey’s Executor, the precedent that for decades protected members of certain multi-member agencies from being removed unless the president had cause. By rejecting that framework, the court opened the door to wider control over roughly two dozen independent agencies that Congress designed to stand apart from day-to-day politics. Trump had tried to fire Slaughter in March 2025, and the court’s ruling cleared the way for that dismissal.

The majority said the FTC exercises executive power and therefore must be controlled by the president. That reasoning reaches beyond one commissioner and one agency. It gives future presidents more direct leverage over regulators that oversee competition policy, financial oversight, workplace rules, and other enforcement functions that Congress had placed at arm’s length. In practical terms, a president who wants faster rule changes, softer enforcement, or a different regulatory agenda now has a stronger hand over agencies that were built to resist exactly that pressure.

The ruling also follows the court’s June 27, 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limited nationwide injunctions from federal district courts. Taken together, the two cases make it harder for lower courts to freeze presidential actions across the country and easier for the White House to push contested policies into effect while legal fights continue. The court’s conservative majority has now repeatedly remade the relationship between the presidency, Congress and the judiciary in Trump’s favor, deepening concerns among critics who say the result is a federal government with fewer checks on executive power.