In a major expansion of presidential authority, the Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday (29) for the president donald trump fire independent government regulators despite federal laws designed to protect their positions. However, the ministers separately created an exception for the Federal Reserve, preventing the president from immediately removing Lisa Cook of the powerful central bank.
The court’s 6-3 decision to broadly allow the firings, with the three progressive justices voting against, represented a significant shift of power from Congress to the president and could usher in a dramatic transformation in the structure of the federal government by giving the president more direct control over independent agencies.
The case specifically tested whether Trump could remove Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, simply because she does not align with his agenda and despite a law that states the president can only remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or misconduct in office.”
But the ruling has implications for more than two dozen agencies — including those charged with protecting consumers, workers, the environment and nuclear safety — that have traditionally been isolated from full presidential control by laws with similar protections.
In a separate ruling, however, a divided court blocked the president from removing Cook, saying she was not given an opportunity to refute the administration’s unproven claims of mortgage fraud, the justification Trump had offered in trying to fire her.
Former senior officials of Fed and Treasury and Cook’s legal team had warned the Supreme Court that allowing Trump to remove her while litigation was ongoing would provoke economic turmoil and undermine the central bank’s long-standing political independence.
The FTC case asked the justices to overturn a 90-year-old precedent in which the court had concluded that such laws were constitutional. This prevented presidents from removing independent regulators without just cause and simply because of political differences.
Most justices have long been sympathetic to the argument the Trump administration was making that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president and that he should be able to control everything the executive branch does. Even before Trump returned to the White House, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had eroded Congress’s power to restrict a president’s authority to remove some independent regulators, deeming unconstitutional some laws that restricted the president from removing independent officials without cause.
Several justices have said for years that they were eager to overturn the 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which protected independent agencies. This case also involved the FTC.
