This is bigger than one fired commissioner.
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed President Trump a major win on presidential power, and it knocked down a shield the administrative state had been hiding behind for nearly a century.
The case is Trump v. Slaughter, and at its heart is a simple question. Do the people who exercise the President’s executive power actually answer to the elected President, or do they get walled off by Congress and the courts?
The Court said they answer to the President.
Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion for a 6-3 majority. The holding is blunt: the Federal Trade Commission’s for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
And if anything meaningful was left of the old precedent that let agency officials defy the President, the Court overruled it.
That precedent is Humphrey’s Executor, a 1935 ruling that for 90 years served as the legal excuse for independent agencies to ignore presidential direction. It is now gone.
The final opinions for today are in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. In Slaughter, the court holds that the FTC’s for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and overrules Humphrey's Executor. https://t.co/R9Zraldsb5
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 29, 2026
Here is how we got here.
Soon after President Trump began his second term in January 2025, he fired the FTC’s two Democratic appointees, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya.
The administration told them their continued service at the FTC was inconsistent with the administration’s priorities, and it cited the President’s Article II authority.
Slaughter, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, refused to accept it and sued to get her seat back.
She pointed to the FTC Act, which said commissioners could be removed only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.
A federal district judge in D.C. sided with Slaughter and issued an injunction. The D.C. Circuit denied the government’s request for a stay.
Then the Supreme Court stepped in. It stayed the lower-court order, granted certiorari before judgment, and heard argument on December 8, 2025.
The Supreme Court docket lays out the full procedural path for No. 25-332, including the September 2025 stay and cert-before-judgment order, the December 8 argument, and the June 29 judgment reversing and remanding the case.
The questions presented were explicit: whether the FTC’s removal protections violate separation of powers, whether Humphrey’s Executor should be overruled, and whether a federal court can stop a removal from public office through legal or equitable relief.
That matters because this was not a routine appeal inching through the system. The Court took the case before the D.C. Circuit had finished, put the lower-court order on hold, and moved straight to the constitutional fight over who controls executive officers.
The docket also shows the lineup: Roberts wrote for the Court; Justice Gorsuch concurred; and Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.
The reasoning is what makes this so significant.
The Court explained that the FTC today exercises real executive power. It writes rules, brings enforcement actions, runs adjudications, conducts investigations, and files civil suits on behalf of the United States.
Officers who wield the President’s power, the Court said, must be removable by him. That keeps them accountable to the President, and it keeps the President accountable to the people who elected him.
Roberts wrote that neither Congress nor the courts may saddle the President with subordinates he cannot work with. And he made clear that if anything more remained of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it.
And there it is. Supreme Court rules: "The FTC’s for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution." Need to dig into this but likely big implications for agencies https://t.co/3DXEOIyETH
— Ben Brody (@BenBrodyDC) June 29, 2026
The New York Post framed the decision as a ruling that President Trump acted lawfully when he fired Slaughter, with Roberts writing the 6-3 opinion.
The Post’s timeline is useful because it ties the legal fight back to the March 2025 firings of Slaughter and Bedoya, the two Democratic FTC commissioners President Trump removed after taking office for his second term.
It also notes Slaughter’s connection to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the argument she leaned on: the FTC Act language saying commissioners could be removed only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.
The lower courts initially gave Slaughter momentum. A D.C. federal judge and an appeals panel both sided with her before the Supreme Court stayed those rulings in September 2025, then used the case to address a broader separation-of-powers battle.
Now for the honest caveat, because this matters.
The decision does not settle every removal question across the entire government. The majority left open questions about certain offices and even noted the Federal Reserve tradition as a possible different category.
On the same day, in Trump v. Cook, the Court denied the government’s bid to stay a lower-court order tied to the attempted removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. So the Fed fight continues on its own track.
But on the core principle, the message is unmistakable. Officials who exercise executive power belong to the executive branch, and the elected President sits at the top of it.
President Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social, calling it a big win and framing it as confirmation of his Article II power to remove executive branch officers and agency appointees.
He noted that presidents had been seeking this outcome since the 1930s and called it one of the most important presidential-power rulings ever.
Full text of the Truth Social post is shown in the image above.
NEWS: Supreme Court overrules a 90-year-old precedent and frees the president to fire independent agency heads
The Supreme Court ruled today that President Trump can remove Federal Trade Commission members at will, and in doing so it overruled Humphrey's Executor, the 1935… pic.twitter.com/T9uHEloJ4d
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) June 29, 2026
He cast the decision as a long-overdue restoration of the President’s constitutional authority over the people who carry out executive power.
For decades, the entrenched bureaucracy treated Humphrey’s Executor as a permanent get-out-of-accountability card. That card just got torn up.
The administrative state always wanted it both ways, exercising the President’s power while answering to no one. The Supreme Court just told them the era of being unaccountable is over.
Read the full Supreme Court ruling here: Trump v. Slaughter.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
