The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 overturned 90 years of precedent to end the independence of multimember regulatory agencies in a decision made in the case of Trump v. Slaughter, allowing the president to fire any agency member for any reason.

The stunning, yet predicted, decision hands Donald Trump the power to control every regulatory agency in the executive branch, a key plank of his Project 2025 agenda.

Congress created multimember agencies to be independent of presidential control by only allowing the president to fire them for cause — not for policy disagreements. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld for-cause removal protections in Humphrey’s Executor v. Federal Trade Commission. This enshrined the progressive era idea that the administrative state should be insulated from the political whims of the executive and legislative branches.

But now those protections are gone after the Supreme Court’s six conservatives affirmed the long-held goal of the conservative legal movement in their decision.

“We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a majority opinion.

Despite the court’s high-minded explanations for protecting the executive branch from encroachments on its constitutional authorities, Trump celebrated the decision as a vast expansion of presidential power.

“Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!” Trump posted on social media on Monday.

The case came before the court after Trump fired FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee, in March 2025, along with commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, for no stated reason. (Bedoya did not join Slaughter’s case as he voluntarily resigned his position.)

In overturning Humphrey’s Executor, the conservative justices have enshrined the unitary executive theory, which holds that all executive power is vested in the president alone, as the law of the land. This marks a move away from the balance of power created by Congress when it enacted the for-cause removal protections and a move towards autocratic presidential control.

This has been the primary objective of the second Trump presidency. Since retaking office, Trump has pushed the boundaries of the balance of powers and the independence of the administrative state by claiming it is his constitutional right to dictate everything from prosecutions at the Department of Justice to regulations and investigations at bodies overseeing everything from universities to finance, including his own companies. It also happens to dovetail with a longstanding project of the conservative judiciary.

That project flowed through a series of cases limiting congressionally imposed restrictions on presidential control over certain regulatory agencies. Before Slaughter, those cases had whittled down for-cause removal protections to only agencies with multiple members who performed functions that were not “purely executive.”

In Slaughter, the court finally ruled that this construction no longer applies.

“While Humphrey’s was surely right to focus on ‘the character of the office’... and surely right to say that ‘purely executive’ powers must be controlled by the President ... we long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive,” Roberts wrote.

Congress could “establish independent agencies to assist it with its functions.” Roberts writes. “But it may not foist those agencies upon the President, and thus deprive him of ‘the executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution’ — something Humphrey’s itself never purported to permit.”

Where the decision focuses specifically on the functions of the FTC, the agency from which Slaughter was fired, it states that the agency “unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive, in whom such power is vested.”

And so, Trump will now be able to officially control every regulatory body in the executive branch by threatening removal for any disagreement. That is with one exception: the Federal Reserve. The opinion simply states that the history of central banking independence counsels against providing the president such a power, but does not affirmatively rule on whether or not the Federal Reserve’s board may be covered by for-cause removal protections.

“Our prior cases do not necessarily implicate the constitutionality of such arrangements,” Roberts wrote. “Our opinion today should not be read to do so either.”

This decision to dodge questions of the Federal Reserve’s independence highlights the fault lines in the high court’s unitary executive theory and shows that it weighs other considerations, like economic stability, rather than its claims of strict constitutional observance. It also comes as Trump has waged a war to seize control of the Fed by attempting to fire Governor Lisa Cook and launching a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. A judge blocked that investigation from continuing on March 13. And the court refused to overrule that lower court decision on Monday.

The decision in Trump v. Cook, also written by Roberts, but joined by the court’s liberals and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, explains that Trump’s arguments for her removal are not likely to succeed.

“To accept any one of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment — an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” Roberts wrote in Cook.

In a concurrence in Cook, Kavanaugh explicitly states that the court should not “risk destabilizing the U. S. economy” by not ruling now that the Federal Reserve may remain independent, in spite of the decision in Slaughter.

“In my view, in light of that historical practice and precedent, the Federal Reserve may continue as an independent agency after Slaughter,” Kavanaugh wrote. “If the Federal Reserve’s for-cause removal protections are to be eliminated, that change must occur through the legislative process.”

While that decision remains off in the future now, Slaughter has greatly expanded executive power at the expense of Congress. Trump and future presidents will now be able to radically remake the executive branch after each election and then direct regulatory and law enforcement officers to do as they please. It marks a substantial change from the balance that has governed executive and congressional relations for nearly 100 years.

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