How Trump’s Supreme Court case could transform presidential power over US regulators

Donald Trump

For more than forty years, US conservative legal thinkers have argued that the American president should have far greater authority over federal agencies. That idea, rooted in the Reagan era and embraced later by Chief Justice John Roberts, is now on the brink of a defining test. When the US Supreme Court hears arguments in a case involving President Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, it confronts a question that goes to the heart of how modern government works: can US Congress shield certain regulators from the president, or does the Constitution require those officials to serve entirely at his pleasure, the New York Times reported.

This moment was inevitable. Trump has spent his second term removing leaders of independent agencies whose policies do not match his agenda. In Slaughter’s case, he dismissed her with a brief message saying her service was inconsistent with his priorities, even though a decades-old law allows removal only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance. Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner confirmed to a term running through 2029, challenged her firing. Lower courts sided with her, leaning on a 1935 precedent that allowed Congress to give such officials a measure of job protection. That ruling, Humphrey’s Executor, has been a cornerstone of the modern administrative state. Monday’s arguments will determine whether it survives.

Independent agencies were created to operate at some distance from day-to-day politics. Over time, they have taken on responsibilities ranging from policing deceptive business practices to guarding nuclear safety. If the court now gives presidents broad power to remove their leaders at will, the entire structure of these institutions could change. Trump has already ousted Democrats from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The FTC has been functioning with only Republican commissioners since March. The court’s emergency orders in recent months suggest a willingness to accept these firings while deeper legal questions work their way up. Slaughter’s challenge is the first to reach the justices for a final, binding decision.

None of this unfolds in a vacuum. As a young lawyer in the Reagan White House, Roberts argued that independent agencies were a constitutional anomaly because they constrained presidential control. As chief justice, he has written opinions carving away at those constraints. His 2020 ruling striking down the removal protections for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director marked a major shift, but he drew a line between single-director agencies and multimember commissions. The Slaughter case now tests whether that line holds or whether the court will extend full presidential removal power across the board.

The legal arguments turn partly on history. Conservatives aligned with Trump say the Constitution’s grant of executive power to the president requires the authority to remove those who act on his behalf. Slaughter’s lawyers counter that the founding era did not adopt a single

clear rule and that Congress has long had wide discretion to design agency structures. They warn that overturning the 1935 precedent now would upend institutions woven into a century of governance. Even scholars who identify as originalists concede that the historical evidence is far from settled, creating a rare moment where the conservative majority must decide how strictly to apply its philosophy.

Recent dissents from the court’s three liberal justices suggest they believe the majority has already signalled its leanings through emergency rulings that expanded presidential control step by step. Justice Elena Kagan has written that the court appears eager to declare the old precedent dead, even if the final blow has not yet been delivered. The outcome, expected by June, will determine how far presidents can go in reshaping the federal bureaucracy and how much independence remains for regulators who were once insulated from political pressure.