WASHINGTON — Supreme Court conservatives said Monday they are willing to overturn Congress and give President Trump more power to fire officials at independent agencies and commissions.
The justices heard arguments about whether Trump was could have fired Rebecca Slaughterone of two Democratic appointees to the five-member Federal Trade Commission.
The case represents a clash between Congress' powers to structure government and the “executive power” of the president.
Trump's decision heralds a historic shift in the federal government away from bipartisan experts and toward more partisan control by the president.
Trump Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the court should overturn the 1935 decision that upheld independent agencies. The decision “was grossly wrong when it was made. It should be overturned,” he told the court.
The court's three liberals strongly opposed what they called “radical changes” to American government.
If the president can fire the heads of independent agencies, longstanding civil service laws could also be overturned, they said.
This would place “massive, unchecked and unchecked power in the hands of the president,” Justice Elena Kagan said.
But six conservatives said they were concerned that the agencies were exercising “executive power” vested in the president.
However, it is unclear whether the court will rule broadly to cover all independent agencies or focus solely on the Federal Trade Commission and other similar commissions.
For most of American history, Congress created independent boards and commissions to carry out specific tasks, each headed by a board of experts appointed for fixed terms.
But the court's current conservative majority argues that these commissions and boards are unconstitutional unless their officers can be fired at will by the new president.
Previous presidents signed these measures into law, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld them 90 years ago. case called “Hangman Humphrey v. United States”.
By creating such bodies, Congress often responded to the problems of a new era.
The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to regulate railroad rates. The Federal Trade Commission, which is the subject of the lawsuit, was created in 1914 to investigate corporate monopolies. A year earlier, the Federal Reserve Board had been created to supervise banks, prevent panics, and regulate the money supply.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market and the National Labor Relations Board to resolve labor disputes.
Decades later, Congress has focused on security. The National Transportation Safety Board was created to investigate aircraft accidents, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission investigates products that may pose a hazard. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission protects the public from nuclear hazards.
Typically, Congress gave appointees, a mix of Republicans and Democrats, fixed terms and stated that they could be removed only for “ineffectiveness, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in the performance of official duties.”
Slaughter was first nominated by Trump to fill the Democratic seat and was reappointed by President Biden in 2023 to a seven-year term.
But conservatives have often long derided the agencies and commissions as an out-of-control “administrative state,” and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has said he believes their independence from direct presidential control is unconstitutional.
“The President’s power to remove—and thereby control—those who exercise executive power on his behalf is derived from the text” of the Constitution, he said. wrote last year in his opinion, which for the first time declared that the President had immunity from subsequent prosecution for crimes committed while in office.
Roberts spoke in a 6–3 majority, laying out an extremely expansive view of presidential power while limiting the power of Congress.
Article I of the Constitution states that Congress “shall have the power…to make all laws which are necessary and proper to execute…all other powers vested in” the U.S. government. Article II states: “The Executive Power is vested in the President of the United States.”
The current majority of the justices holds that the president's executive power trumps Congress's power to impose statutory restrictions.
“Congress has no power to check the President's 'unfettered power of removal' over the executive officers of the United States,” Roberts wrote in his newspaper last year. Trump vs USA.
Four months later, Trump won re-election and quickly moved to fire a number of Democratic appointees who were subject to fixed terms set by Congress. Slaughter, along with several other fired appointees, sued, citing the law and her fixed term. They won their case before federal district judges and the U.S. Court of Appeals.
But Trump's lawyers filed emergency appeals to the Supreme Court, and the justices voted 6 to 3 sided with the president and against dismissed officials.
In September, the court said it would hear arguments in Trump v. Slaughter to decide whether to overturn Hangman Humphrey's decision.
Conservatives welcomed the move at the time. “For too long, Executive Humphrey has allowed unaccountable agencies like the Federal Trade Commission to wield executive power without meaningful oversight,” said Corey Andrews, general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.
In defense of the 1935 decision, law professors noted that the court stated that these independent boards were not purely executive, but also had legislative and judicial responsibilities, such as passing regulations or resolving labor disputes.
During Monday's argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the principle of “democratic accountability” requires obedience to Congress, not the president.
“Congress decided that certain issues should be handled by nonpartisan experts. They said expertise matters in economics and transportation. So for a president to come in and fire all the scientists, doctors, economists and Ph.D.s and replace them with loyalists is not really in the best interests of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
But this argument did not find support among Roberts and the Conservatives. They stated that the president is elected and has executive power to control federal agencies.
The only obvious doubt concerned the Federal Reserve Board, whose independence is valued by business. The Chamber of Commerce said the court should overturn the 1935 decision but make an exception for Federal Reserve.
Trump's lawyer reluctantly agreed. If “there is an exception to debarment,” he wrote in his brief in the Slaughter case, it must be an “agency-specific anomaly” limited to the Federal Reserve.
