In March 2025, President Trump fired both Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, telling them their continued service was “inconsistent with the Administration’s priorities.” Neither had been accused of misconduct or neglect. Federal law required “cause” for the removal of an FTC commissioner. Slaughter sued.

In Trump v. Slaughter, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority holding that the “for cause” restriction on removing FTC commissioners is unconstitutional. The reasoning: the Constitution vests the entirety of executive power in the president, and the ability to remove officers who exercise that power is essential to it. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The ruling reaches well past the FTC. For-cause protections are gone or in doubt at the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and other multimember independent agencies built on the same structure.

The protection Slaughter just eliminated came from Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), a unanimous decision holding that FTC commissioners perform “quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial” functions, not purely executive ones, so Congress could insulate them from at-will removal. For eight decades, that case was the constitutional floor under the entire independent-agency system.

The floor started cracking in 2020. Seila Law v. CFPB held that a single director running an agency alone, unlike a multimember commission, couldn’t claim the same protection. In 2021, Collins v. Yellen stripped the same protection from the single director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Both rulings narrowed Humphrey’s Executor without overturning it, carving out single-director agencies while leaving multimember commissions like the FTC alone. Slaughter is the case that finished the job, overturning Humphrey’s Executor itself.

The majority’s argument rests on accountability. The Constitution gives executive power to one person, the president, precisely so voters know whom to blame or credit. An FTC commissioner who can’t be fired without cause answers to no one on Election Day. Roberts’ opinion treats Humphrey’s Executor as a constitutional anomaly that survived on inertia rather than sound reasoning, and treats Slaughter as the correction.

This is also the culmination of a decades-long legal project. The “unitary executive” theory, the idea that all executive power runs through the president without carve-outs for agencies Congress prefers to insulate, has been building in conservative legal circles since the Reagan administration. Seila Law and Collins were incremental wins. Slaughter is the one its architects were after.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argues the ruling “reshapes our Government,” converting dozens of independent commissions into agencies that answer directly to the president. Congress built multimember, bipartisan commissions on purpose, she argues, as a deliberate judgment that decisions like antitrust enforcement, labor disputes, and product safety standards shouldn’t reset every time a new administration takes office. Remove that insulation, and regulatory policy becomes as changeable as a Cabinet meeting.

The dissent also flags what the majority left unresolved. The same day, in a narrower 5-4 companion case, Trump v. Cook, the Court blocked Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, reasoning that the “Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference” justified different treatment. Sotomayor’s dissent asks why monetary policy gets a shield that antitrust enforcement and labor law don’t, and warns the unanswered scope questions will generate confusion in the lower courts for years.

The Slaughter firings stand: Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya are out at the FTC for good. Commissioners at the other affected agencies now serve at the president’s discretion, regardless of what their governing statutes say about cause. Whether a change of administration in 2028 or beyond means wholesale commissioner turnover at agencies like the NLRB and the SEC is now a live question, not a hypothetical one.

The Fed carve-out is narrower than it looks. Trump v. Cook kept Lisa Cook in her seat while her case proceeds, but the underlying dispute over her removal, and over whether “central banking” is different in kind from every other agency the Court just stripped of protection, isn’t resolved. Trump’s stated reason for firing Cook was a mortgage fraud allegation predating her Fed tenure. Cook and her allies say the real reason was her refusal to cut interest rates on the administration’s timeline. Watch that case for the outer edge of how far Slaughter’s logic extends.