The Federal Trade Commission sits at the center of Trump v. Slaughter, No. 25-332, argued December 8, 2025. The Trump administration fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, which respondents contend was without cause and in violation of the FTC Act's for-cause removal protection. Slaughter sued, the district court rejected the government's arguments, and the case reached the Supreme Court on the question of whether Humphrey's Executor v. United States — the 1935 decision upholding those protections — should be overruled.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer opened by calling Humphrey's Executor an indefensible outlier and urging the Court to overrule it explicitly. He argued that the President's power to remove officers wielding executive power is, under the Court's own decisions from Ex Parte Hennen through Trump v. United States, conclusive and preclusive, subject to no statutory restriction and no judicial review. In his telling, Humphrey's has become a decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions, and its philosophy has tempted Congress to erect at the heart of our government a headless fourth branch insulated from political accountability and democratic control.
The justices spent much of the argument probing where that logic stops. Justice Kagan pressed Sauer on whether accepting the Vesting Clause rationale — that all executive power is vested in the President — would necessarily sweep in inferior officers, civil-service employees, Article I courts, and the Federal Reserve. Sauer acknowledged that restrictions on inferior officers would be problematic under the logic of Myers, and that the NLRB and MSPB are already being challenged in this Court, but declined to take a position on non-Article III courts or the Federal Reserve, noting the Court had described the Federal Reserve as a quasi-private uniquely structured entity that follows a distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States. Justice Kagan responded that putting a footnote in an opinion reserving those questions does little good if the entire logic of the opinion drives the Court there anyway.
Justice Sotomayor challenged the historical premise, noting that independent agencies have existed since the founding — pointing to the Sinking Fund Commission and the War Commission — and asked where else the Court had so fundamentally altered the structure of government. Sauer replied that Pennoyer v. Neff was overruled on its hundredth birthday and that Erie overruled Swift v. Tyson 96 years later, but Sotomayor pressed that neither restructured the entire government. Justice Jackson argued that Congress's Article I authority to create agencies and set their structure, reinforced by the Necessary and Proper Clause, should include the power to insulate certain officers from at-will removal, and that the President's interest in controlling everything does not automatically outweigh Congress's considered judgment that nonpartisan expertise serves the public interest.
Justice Kavanaugh, while expressing sympathy for the accountability argument, drew a sharp distinction between overruling Humphrey's and destroying the agencies themselves, confirming with Sauer that the proper remedy would be to sever the for-cause removal provision rather than eliminate the FTC. He also raised serious doubts about the government's second question presented — whether courts may order reinstatement of a wrongfully removed officer — noting it would effectively nullify the exceptions the government itself had identified for the Federal Reserve and non-Article III courts.
Respondents' counsel Amit Agarwal defended the district court's judgment and urged the Court to adhere to all of its precedents. He argued that no tool of interpretation clearly supports an unrestricted and indefeasible presidential removal power over traditional independent agencies, that a 111-year-old statute unanimously upheld in Humphrey's and followed by every President since 1935 carries enormous reliance weight, and that the real-world risks of Petitioners' theory — including potential presidential control over the Federal Elections Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — are not hypothetical. He also pointed to recent historical scholarship, including an essay by Professor Nelson cited in respondents' brief and amicus briefs including one by Professor Nourse, suggesting that the founding-era record is at a minimum contestable and that early commissions were in many respects more independent than modern agencies. Chief Justice Roberts pressed Agarwal on whether Humphrey's remains viable given how dramatically the FTC's powers have expanded since 1935, describing Humphrey's Executor as just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was, and asking what the next good case was. Agarwal pointed to Wiener v. United States and Free Enterprise Fund as cases in which the Court unanimously concluded that a single layer of for-cause removal protection does not offend the separation of powers even with respect to agencies wielding significant executive authority.