On Monday, December 8, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case that could fundamentally reshape the balance of power between the president and Congress, with broad implications for the independence of federal agencies. At the heart of the case is President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter earlier this year—a move that has reignited a decades-old debate over executive authority and congressional oversight.
The case stems from Trump’s dismissal of Slaughter and fellow FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya in March 2025. While Bedoya ultimately dropped his legal challenge, Slaughter fought her removal in federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with her, ordering her reinstatement. However, the Supreme Court intervened and put that ruling on hold, pending its own review—a move that drew dissent from the court’s liberal justices, including Justice Elena Kagan.
At issue is a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey’s Executor, which established that the president cannot remove members of certain independent agencies, like the FTC, without cause. This precedent has long served as a bulwark insulating federal agencies from direct political interference. Now, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling, arguing that such restrictions unconstitutionally limit presidential control over the executive branch.
According to Roll Call, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court that agencies like the FTC, Federal Reserve Board, National Labor Relations Board, and others regulate "innumerable aspects of modern life," and that the president should have the authority to remove the officials who wield such significant power. The administration’s brief contends, "Congress and the courts cannot divert accountability ‘somewhere else’ by empowering unelected agency heads to wield executive power walled off from presidential control and electoral accountability."
The Trump administration further argues that the FTC and similar agencies perform executive functions—such as issuing rules, adjudicating cases, and investigating violations of law—that should fall squarely under presidential authority. Even if Congress could pass a law restricting the president’s ability to fire such officials, the administration claims, the courts should not have the power to reinstate them.
On the other side, Slaughter’s defense maintains that Congress deliberately created independent agencies to be insulated from direct presidential control, precisely to preserve their impartiality and expertise. In a legal brief, Slaughter’s lawyers argued, "They seek to vindicate the principle of democratic political accountability by asking unelected and politically unaccountable courts to jettison longstanding laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives."
Lauren Miller Karalunas, counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Roll Call that the stakes go far beyond the technical question of Slaughter’s removal. "They won’t just be deciding the technical question of whether President Trump can remove these officials, they’ll also be deciding a much more profound question of whether the president can override the will of Congress," she said.
More than 200 Democrats in Congress have filed a brief opposing Trump’s position, emphasizing that multi-member boards like the FTC represent a "longstanding compromise" between the executive and legislative branches. These boards, they argue, were intentionally designed to be "insulated from the whims or short-term thinking of any given president." As Miller Karalunas put it, "With a decision that allows the president to ignore the checks and balances intended by Congress, the president can act as a kind of mob boss-like figure using agencies to harm enemies and benefit allies."
In recent years, the Supreme Court has chipped away at similar protections, ruling in favor of allowing the president to remove officials such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, despite statutory safeguards. According to Oliver Dunford, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, these decisions—as well as emergency rulings favoring the Trump administration—"pretty clearly suggest that the court believes the president should have the authority to remove the heads of multimember agencies such as the FTC."
Of the dozens of officials removed by Trump this term, the conservative majority has let just two remain in their jobs while they challenge their firings: Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter. The Supreme Court plans to decide the legality of Cook’s firing after oral arguments next year and has paused the administration’s efforts to remove Perlmutter until after resolving both the Cook and Slaughter cases.
Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting from the court’s decision to let Trump remove Slaughter on an emergency basis, warned about the dangers of shifting power from Congress to the president. She wrote, "Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers."
Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University, told Roll Call that the outcome of the case could have sweeping consequences for the functioning of American government. "Do you want your patent application decided by a call from the White House? Do we want to live in a world where your IP rights are at the whim of the party in power? Presumably, the answer is no," Rosenblum said. He added that the justices are caught between preserving firing protections for senior agency officials—a group the court has often viewed skeptically—and potentially putting the independence of agencies like the Federal Reserve at risk.
Rosenblum, who filed an amicus brief in the case, pointed to the long history of Congress creating federal officials who could not be removed by the president. He suggested that a decision in Trump’s favor could leave Congress with little recourse beyond passing laws, while the president would gain sweeping control over the executive branch.
On the other hand, some legal scholars and lawmakers argue that the current system lets Congress avoid difficult decisions by delegating power to agencies. Dunford remarked, "Congress has ceded its policymaking power to these agencies, and members of Congress have been happy to let their egos go and stay in office by blaming these agencies." Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee echoed this view in their own Supreme Court filing, asserting that agencies cannot operate constitutionally without direct presidential control. Their brief stated that the current arrangement undermines government by "incentivizing Congress to pass the buck to faceless bureaucrats on difficult or intractable issues."
The case also arrives amid a broader realignment of the Supreme Court’s conservative and liberal justices, a dynamic explored in a recent Law.com podcast. The podcast, published on December 4, 2025, featured analysis of how the court’s shifting ideological lines could influence decisions on executive power and the future of agency independence.
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments, the nation waits to see whether the justices will uphold longstanding protections for independent agencies or hand the president greater authority to shape the federal bureaucracy. The outcome could change the way government works for generations to come, affecting everything from nuclear waste regulation to telemarketing and labor disputes.
Whatever the decision, it’s clear that the stakes extend far beyond one commissioner’s job—they strike at the very core of how American democracy balances power between its branches.
