Background
The Federal Trade Commission was established in 1914 with five Commissioners serving staggered seven-year terms. Under 15 U.S.C. §41, a President may remove an FTC Commissioner only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” When President Trump began his second term in January 2025, the FTC had two Republican and three Democratic members. After former Chair Lina Khan resigned, the Commission was evenly split. In March 2025, the President fired the two remaining Democratic Commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without identifying any statutory cause — instead telling them their “continued service on the FTC was inconsistent with his Administration’s priorities” and citing his authority under Article II.
Slaughter filed suit seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to be restored to office, arguing the removal was ultra vires, violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and violated the Constitution. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment for Slaughter. Acknowledging that Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), generally permits at-will removal of executive officers, the district court held itself bound by Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), which carved out an exception for the FTC as a “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” body. The court declared the removal ultra vires and issued a permanent injunction reinstating Slaughter. A divided D.C. Circuit denied a stay pending appeal, finding the Government had “no prospect of success.” The Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order and granted certiorari before judgment.
Bedoya separately resigned from the FTC after litigation commenced; his claims were dismissed as moot, leaving only Slaughter’s claims before the Court.
The Court’s Holding
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a five-justice majority (Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joining; Thomas joining all but Part III-B), held that the FTC’s for-cause removal provision is unconstitutional. The Court grounded its analysis in Article II’s vesting of “the executive Power” in a single President, together with the Take Care Clause. Drawing on the Framers’ deliberate rejection of the plural-executive models used by most states in 1787, the Court reaffirmed that the President must be able to remove subordinate officers at will — that power being a “necessary corollary” of unified executive authority, confirmed by the First Congress’s “Decision of 1789” and the century of practice ratified in Myers.
The Court then squarely overruled Humphrey’s Executor. The majority explained that Humphrey’s rested on the premise that the FTC occupied “no place in the executive department” and exercised “no part of the executive power” — a characterization the Court found untenable. The FTC today administers more than 80 statutes, promulgates binding rules, conducts in-house adjudications, and brings civil enforcement actions in federal court on behalf of the United States. Those functions, the Court held, are “the very essence of ‘execution’ of the law.” Every relevant stare decisis factor — the quality of Humphrey’s reasoning, its consistency with later precedent, the workability of its rule, and reliance interests — counseled overruling it. As to reliance, the Court noted that Congress’s structural reliance on Humphrey’s to create agencies “insulated from presidential control” was itself the constitutional problem, not a reason to preserve the error.
The Court reversed the district court and remanded. It expressly declined to define the outer limits of the removal power, leaving open questions about entities that may not exercise executive power — such as the Federal Reserve in the tradition of the First and Second Banks — and non-Article III courts. Justice Gorsuch filed a concurrence; Justice Sotomayor filed a dissent joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.
Key Takeaways
- Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) is overruled; the “quasi-legislative/quasi-judicial” distinction it drew no longer shields independent-agency heads from presidential removal.
- Any officer who exercises executive power — including FTC Commissioners — must be removable by the President at will; Congress may not condition removal on cause.
- The Court left open whether entities that do not exercise executive power (e.g., the Federal Reserve in its capacity as a successor to the First and Second Banks) or non-Article III adjudicators remain outside the Myers rule.
- Slaughter’s proposed “reasonableness” standard — under which Congress could decide when for-cause protections were warranted — was flatly rejected as no limiting principle at all.
- The decision was granted on certiorari before judgment, bypassing the D.C. Circuit, underscoring the issue’s urgency.
Why It Matters
This is among the most consequential separation-of-powers decisions in decades. By overruling Humphrey’s Executor, the Court dismantles the constitutional foundation on which Congress built the modern independent-agency model — a structure that has governed agencies like the FTC, the NLRB, the FCC, and others for nearly a century. Presidents may now remove commissioners and board members of such agencies without citing cause, dramatically expanding executive control over the administrative state.
Practitioners advising clients before multi-member independent commissions, litigating administrative matters, or structuring regulatory compliance programs must now account for a landscape in which agency leadership can turn over rapidly with each new administration, and in which the long-term predictability that for-cause protections were meant to supply is gone. Open questions about the Federal Reserve and non-Article III courts will drive further litigation, but the core holding leaves little doubt that the era of the truly “independent” agency exercising executive power has ended.