# FTC The **Federal Trade Commission**, created in 1914, is the independent antitrust-and-consumer-protection agency. It challenges monopolies and anticompetitive mergers under the Clayton Act, polices "unfair or deceptive acts or practices" under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and shares antitrust enforcement with the [[Department of Justice]] Antitrust Division. Five commissioners, seven-year terms, no more than three from one party — on paper. ## Why the FTC matters to this vault Two reasons, and they point in opposite directions. **First, it is where the right's ambivalence about corporate power is fought out.** There is a genuine and unresolved split. One strand — sometimes called the "Khanservative" current, after the Biden-era chair whose theories it partly adopted — supports aggressive antitrust against Big Tech, framing platform dominance as a censorship problem rather than a price problem. The other strand is the traditional business-friendly consensus that treats antitrust enforcement as a drag on growth. The FTC is the institution where that argument produces actual outcomes, so its docket is a better guide to which strand is winning than any amount of rhetoric. Chairman [[Andrew Ferguson]], chair since January 2025, has kept the populist framing toward Big Tech while reversing the prior commission's broader rulemaking agenda — which is roughly what a synthesis of the two strands looks like in practice. **Second, and more consequentially, the FTC is the agency where the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] became law.** In March 2025 the President fired Democratic commissioners [[Rebecca Slaughter]] and Alvaro Bedoya without cause, in open defiance of the FTC Act's for-cause removal protection. Slaughter sued. On June 29, 2026 the Supreme Court decided [[Trump v. Slaughter]] 6–3, overruling [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] — the 1935 decision that had, for ninety-one years, made the independent commission a constitutionally permissible form of government. The FTC's centrality here is not accidental. *Humphrey's Executor* was itself an FTC case. The 1935 Court upheld for-cause protection precisely because it thought the FTC's work was "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" rather than purely executive. The 2026 Court declared that distinction incoherent and dissolved it. The same agency that established the independent-commission model ended it, ninety-one years apart. ## What the ruling means here Every multi-member commission with for-cause protection — the [[SEC]], [[FCC]], [[NLRB]], [[CFPB]], and dozens more — is now removable at will, with the [[Federal Reserve]] as the sole carve-out. The bipartisan-balance requirements written into their statutes survive as text but not as constraint. For this vault the significance is that a structural feature of American governance dating to 1887 was retired not by legislation but by a litigation campaign, and the FTC is where both the campaign's target and its trophy sat. See [[Trump v. Slaughter]] for the full doctrinal arc from *Myers* (1926) through *Seila Law* (2020), the Gorsuch concurrence pointing toward nondelegation as the next front, and the Election Assistance Commission purge that followed ten days later. ## See Also - [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] - [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] - [[Andrew Ferguson]] · [[Rebecca Slaughter]] - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[Administrative State]] · [[Corporate Power]] - [[Federal Agencies]]