# Trump v. Slaughter **Trump v. Slaughter**, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), decided June 29, 2026, is the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] decision that overruled [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] and held that the President may remove independent-agency commissioners at will. The 6--3 ruling, split on ideological lines, ended ninety-one years of precedent that had allowed Congress to insulate certain agency heads from presidential firing. Chief Justice [[John Roberts]] wrote for the majority; Justice [[Sonia Sotomayor]] dissented, joined by Justices [[Elena Kagan]] and [[Ketanji Brown Jackson]]. The case is the capstone of a decades-long [[Federalist Society]] litigation campaign to vindicate the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] -- the claim that Article II vests all executive power in the President alone, and that any officer who wields such power must be removable at will. Its practical consequence is to bring every multi-member independent commission under direct presidential control, collapsing a structural feature of American governance that dates to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. ## Background ### The firing On March 18, 2025, President Trump fired [[FTC]] commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and her fellow Democratic commissioner Alvaro Bedoya. Slaughter received no substantive reason for her termination -- only that her "continued service on the [[FTC]] is inconsistent with this Administration's priorities." The firing openly defied the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which provides that commissioners may be removed only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" -- the for-cause removal protection that [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] had upheld as constitutional in 1935. ### The legal question Slaughter sued, and the case moved quickly to the [[Supreme Court of the United States]]. The question presented was narrow in form but enormous in consequence: does the President's removal power under Article II permit the at-will firing of independent-agency commissioners, notwithstanding statutory for-cause protections -- and does [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] survive? [[D. John Sauer]], in his capacity as Solicitor General, argued the case for the government. ## The ruling ### Majority opinion (6--3) [[John Roberts]] delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by [[Samuel Alito]], [[Neil Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett]], and joined by [[Clarence Thomas]] as to all but Part III-B. The majority held: The Constitution vests the "executive Power" in the President, and officers who exercise that power must be subject to presidential removal at will. [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] rested on a distinction between "purely executive" officers and those performing "quasi-legislative" or "quasi-judicial" functions -- a distinction the Court declared incoherent. Roberts wrote that "Humphrey's framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time" and that the 1935 precedent had become "a result in search of a rationale." The majority concluded: "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it." The Court rejected the argument that *stare decisis* required preserving the precedent, finding that [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] was poorly reasoned from the start, had been steadily eroded by subsequent decisions, and that reliance interests were insufficient to save it. ### The Federal Reserve carve-out (Part III-B) The one exception: the [[Federal Reserve]]. In Part III-B of the opinion, Roberts held that the Fed occupies a "distinct historical tradition" tracing to the First and Second Banks of the United States -- institutions that influenced monetary policy and were never subject to plenary presidential control. On that basis, the majority preserved for-cause removal protection for [[Federal Reserve]] Board of Governors members. The companion case decided the same day, *Trump v. Cook*, applied this carve-out to uphold the position of Fed Governor [[Lisa Cook]], whom Trump had also attempted to fire, by a 5--4 vote. [[Clarence Thomas]] declined to join Part III-B -- he agreed with the rest of the majority but saw no principled basis for exempting the [[Federal Reserve]] from the same constitutional logic applied to every other agency. ### Gorsuch concurrence [[Neil Gorsuch]] filed a concurrence that looked past removal power to the next frontier. He agreed fully with the majority's holding but warned that the decision creates a new problem: the President now directly controls agencies that exercise not only executive power but also vast delegated legislative and judicial powers. Gorsuch wrote: "The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists. The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white." His prescription: "From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts." He urged the Court to revive and apply the nondelegation doctrine, the major questions doctrine, due-process and vagueness doctrines, and the Seventh Amendment right to jury trial -- a roadmap for future litigation aimed at the [[Administrative State]] itself. ### Dissent [[Sonia Sotomayor]] dissented, joined by [[Elena Kagan]] and [[Ketanji Brown Jackson]]. The dissent argued: The majority "unsettled over a century of law and practice" dating to 1887. The Constitution contains no removal clause, and the Founding-era debate was far more nuanced than the majority acknowledged -- the dissent charged the majority with eliding inconvenient Framers' statements that reflected a range of views on presidential removal power. Sotomayor wrote that Congress had established multi-member commissions "to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control." The decision "reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands." She specifically named the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board as agencies now exposed. On the [[Federal Reserve]] carve-out, the dissent was scathing: the majority offered no principled explanation for why only monetary-policy agencies deserved protection, and no standard for determining how closely the Fed must resemble its historical antecedents to keep its exemption. Sotomayor concluded that the ruling gives the President "far more power than even kings or the Parliament of Great Britain" possessed at the time of the Founding. "Chaos will follow." ## The doctrinal arc *Trump v. Slaughter* did not arrive in a vacuum. It is the culmination of a century-long argument about presidential removal power, driven in its modern form by the [[Federalist Society]] and conservative legal movement: *Myers v. United States* (1926) -- the Court, per Chief Justice (and former President) Taft, struck down a statute requiring Senate consent for the removal of postmasters, establishing broad presidential removal power. This is the foundation the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] builds on. *[[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]]* (1935) -- the great obstacle. The Court distinguished *Myers* and upheld for-cause removal protection for [[FTC]] commissioners, blessing the independent-agency model. For ninety-one years, this was the law. *Morrison v. Olson* (1988) -- the Court upheld the independent-counsel statute 7--1. [[Antonin Scalia]]'s lone dissent, arguing the statute violated the unitary executive, became the movement's foundational text -- a dissent that has aged into near-doctrine. *Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB* (2010) -- struck down two layers of for-cause removal protection (the PCAOB's members could only be removed by SEC commissioners who themselves could only be removed for cause). First crack in *Humphrey's*. *Seila Law LLC v. CFPB* (2020) -- held that the [[CFPB]]'s single-director structure with for-cause protection was unconstitutional. The Court narrowed [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] to multi-member commissions but declined to overrule it outright. *Collins v. Yellen* (2021) -- applied the same logic to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Another chip off the precedent. *Trump v. Slaughter* (2026) -- overrules [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] in full. The journey from *Myers* to *Slaughter* spans exactly one century. ## Immediate consequences The ruling's effects ripple across the federal government. Every multi-member independent commission with statutory for-cause removal protection is now constitutionally exposed. The President may fire at will the commissioners of the [[SEC]], [[FCC]], [[NLRB]], [[CFPB]], [[FTC]], and dozens of other agencies -- an authority no President has held since before the New Deal. Practically, this means: a President can reshape agency policy overnight by replacing hostile commissioners with loyalists, without needing to wait for term expirations. The bipartisan-balance requirements that many commission statutes impose (no more than three of five commissioners from the same party, for example) remain on the books but are now toothless against a President willing to fire and replace. The [[Federal Reserve]] is the sole exception, shielded by the Part III-B carve-out -- though [[Clarence Thomas]]'s refusal to join that section, and the dissent's critique of its reasoning, suggest that even this protection may be litigated in the future. ## Slaughter in practice: the EAC purge The first major invocation of *Trump v. Slaughter* came just ten days after the decision. On **July 9, 2026**, the White House cited the ruling to justify firing all three remaining commissioners of the [[Election Assistance Commission]] — the bipartisan body Congress created under the [[Help America Vote Act]] to certify voting systems and administer election-infrastructure grants. The firings left the EAC without the three-member quorum it needs to act, rendering it unable to certify voting machines, issue guidance, or distribute election-security grants ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The White House framed the purge as a straightforward application of *Slaughter*: the President may remove agency heads at will, and the EAC's commissioners are agency heads. But legal commentator Harry Litman argued the administration was stretching the ruling past its holding. Nothing in *Slaughter* or the earlier agency cases, Litman contended, gives the President the power to **disable** an agency of Congress's creation — to fire every member simultaneously so that the body cannot function. The removal power recognized in *Slaughter* is the power to replace personnel, not to shut down an institution by denying it a quorum. The distinction matters: one is executive control; the other is executive nullification of a congressional statute. The EAC purge thus represents the bridge between [[Unitary Executive Theory]] as constitutional doctrine and [[Voter Suppression]] as political strategy. By hollowing out the only federal agency devoted to election administration — months before midterm elections — the administration achieved through personnel what it could not achieve through legislation (the [[SAVE Act]] still has no Senate path) or through the courts (Judge Sooknanan blocked the SAVE database overhaul in June 2026). The quorum-denial pattern — fire enough members to prevent an independent commission from acting, then claim its powers for the executive — is the operational playbook that *Slaughter* enables. ## KB significance For the Right Wing KB, *Trump v. Slaughter* is the event where the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] stops being a theory and becomes operational law. It connects to virtually every major thread: The [[Administrative State]] dismantlement project mapped in [[Project 2025]] now has its constitutional green light. The independent agencies that [[Project 2025]] targeted for restructuring can be brought to heel through personnel, not just policy. The [[Federalist Society]]'s multi-decade litigation strategy -- seeding sympathetic judges, developing the doctrinal arguments, bringing the right cases -- reaches its payoff. The arc from *Myers* through *Humphrey's* through *Seila Law* to *Slaughter* is a case study in how legal movements reshape constitutional law over generations. [[Neil Gorsuch]]'s concurrence signals the next phase: the nondelegation doctrine. If independent agencies are now executive agencies, then the broad rulemaking and adjudicatory powers Congress delegated to them on the assumption of independence become constitutionally suspect. The [[Administrative State]] faces not just political capture but structural dismantlement through the courts. Combined with [[Schedule F]] (reclassifying career civil servants as at-will employees), the ruling completes the top-to-bottom presidential control architecture: commissioners at the top, career staff underneath, all removable at the President's discretion. The [[Checks and Balances]] that Congress built into the administrative state over a century of legislation -- [[Separation of Powers]] expressed through institutional design -- have been judicially dismantled in favor of a single theory of executive supremacy. ## See Also - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] - [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] - [[Administrative State]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[Federalist Society]] - [[FTC]] - [[Federal Reserve]] - [[Election Assistance Commission]] - [[Schedule F]] - [[Separation of Powers]] - [[D. John Sauer]] - [[Lisa Cook]]