Supreme Court agrees to reconsider precedent that limits who Trump can fire

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a rush appeal that will decide whether President Donald Trump acted lawfully as he has wrested control of independent federal agencies by firing the board members who led them.

By granting the case involving the Federal Trade Commission, the high court said it is ready to answer a question that has swirled around the second Trump administration from its first weeks: Whether it should overturn a Roosevelt-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect those independent agencies from the whims of the White House.

Since retaking power in February, Trump has sought to upend a decades old system that gives some agencies within the government a degree of independence to do their work without political considerations.

In the meantime, while the case is decided, the court said that Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who has served on the Federal Trade Commission since 2018, could be temporarily removed.

The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from that decision.

The court’s majority, Kagan wrote, “may be raring” to invalidate for-cause removal requirements approved by Congress. But until it does, she wrote, a 1935 precedent on that issue should control.

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” she wrote, echoing a point she made earlier in the year in a similar case. “Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation’s separation of powers.”

In a separate order Monday, the court declined to hear arguments in two related cases – one dealing with Cathy Harris, former chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which reviews federal firings and can reinstate wrongly terminated workers, and another focused on Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board. Those moves effectively focus the dispute on the FTC.

The court will hear arguments in December.

Humphrey’s Executor under fire

The court’s moves Monday squarely queued up the question of whether a 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. US, should be overturned.

It was Trump himself who first placed Slaughter on the FTC in 2018. Former President Joe Biden nominated her for a second term, and the Senate confirmed her without opposition last year.

The FTC’s five members, appointed by the president, serve seven-year terms and no more than three commissioners can be of the same political party. The agency enforces anti-trust and consumer protection laws.

A federal district court ordered Slaughter’s reinstatement in July and an appeals court in Washington, DC, ultimately declined to overturn that ruling. The Trump administration appealed earlier this month.

In a series of recent emergency orders, the court has allowed Trump – ever eager to remove dissenting voices from power – to fire leaders of independent agencies who were appointed by Biden. The court’s liberal wing has complained that, following those decisions, the court has effectively already overturned Humphrey’s.

Humphrey’s – a case that dealt directly with the president’s ability to fire a member of the FTC – allowed Congress to require presidents to show cause – before dismissing board members overseeing independent agencies.

Overturning that ruling would give presidents immense power to sweep away from service officials who enforce anti-trust laws, labor rules and disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies.

The Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 supermajority, has signaled skepticism in recent years about the for-cause protections Congress sometimes includes for executive branch officials.

Four years ago, the court’s conservatives held that such protections for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau violated separation of powers principles. The president’s power to “remove – and thus supervise – those who wield executive power” flows directly from the Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

“The CFPB director has no boss, peers, or voters to report to,” Roberts wrote. “Yet the director wields vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory authority over a significant portion of the US economy.”

But the court’s 5-4 decision left Humphrey’s in place, with Roberts noting that it applied only to independent agencies led a by a single director rather than multi-member boards. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, would have gone further. They framed the precedent as a “direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.”

“In a future case,” Thomas wrote, “I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”

The Humphrey’s Executor case dates to President Franklin Roosevelt, who fired a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission in 1933 who was appointed by President Herbert Hoover. William Humphrey continued to argue he was a member of the commission until his death in 1934. His estate sought to recover his salary during the period after his firing and the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that his dismissal was improper.

“It is quite evident,” the court wrote then, “that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter’s will.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.