Hello, this is Jeff Barnum at reading the Supreme Court syllabus in Trump, President of the United States et al. versus Slaughter, sorcery before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Argued December 8, 2025, decided June 9, 2026. The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is a regulatory agency that has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers. The FTC powers belong not to the President or his appointees alone, but instead to five commissioners, each of whom serves for seven years and may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Soon after President Trump began his second term in January of 2025, he fired the FTC's two Democratic appointees, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvara Badoya. He did not identify a cause under the statute. He instead told him their continued service on the FTC was inconsistent with his administration's priorities, and they were removed pursuant to his authority under Article II of the Constitution. Slaughter filed suit against the President and other executive officials, seeking relief to restore her to office. She argued that her removal was ultra viras, violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and violated the Constitution. The district court granted Slaughter's motion for summary judgment. It acknowledged that Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, a Supreme Court case from 1926, generally permits the president to remove executive offers at will, but explained that Humphreys Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602, a Supreme Court case from 1935, carved out an exception for the FTC. The court declared the president's purported removal ultraviras and issued a permanent injunction barring interference with Ms. Slaughter's right to perform her lawful duties. A divided court of appeals denied the government's motion for a stay-pending appeal, and this court stayed the district court's order and granted Sir Shorori before judgment. Held. The FTC's four-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution vests the executive power in a President of the United States of America and instructs that he take care that the laws be faithfully executed. To remain accountable to the president, those officers must be removable by the president. The idea that one president would be in charge was by no means a foregone conclusion in 1787. The flurry of state constitutions that followed the Declaration of Independence made of the gubernatorial magistrate a new kind of creature, a very pale reflection indeed of his regal ancestor. Almost every state had but a nominal governor who could act only with his council's consent. These early chief executives were little more than chairmen of their executive boards. The framers chose to depart from this model, for they had seen its flaws up close. For fear of monarchical power, William Livingston lamented, the states improvidently had devised executives too weak and inefficacious to operate with proper energy and vigor. Thus, when delegates at the Constitutional Convention objected to unity in the executive magistracy as the fetus of monarchy, others replied that the concern was quite backward. Instead of being the fetus of monarchy, they explained, unity in the executive was the best safeguard against it, for only a single person could produce the vigor and activity necessary to preserve the Constitution's separation of powers. In opting for one president, however, the framers did not opt for the president to work alone. They knew that Congress would institute the great departments and allow the president to appoint officers therein to assist him in discharging the duties of his trust. These officers were to serve as envoys of the president, not his equals. They ought to be considered as the assistants or deputies of the chief magistrate, Hamilton explained, and on this account they ought to derive their offices from his appointment, at least from his nomination, and ought to be subject to his superintendents. Because these officers were subject to the president's superintendents, they had to be removable by him at will. The power to remove at will was a necessary caulery of the Constitution's design. The unity of the executive branch would be destroyed if it were vested ostensibly in one man, subject in whole or in part to the control and cooperation of others, in the capacity of counselors to him. Text and structure thus both taught that the president had to be able to remove those who failed to live up to their duties, lest he failed to live up to his. This aspect of the president's role was confirmed in the Constitution's first year and the years that followed, resulting in a regular course of practice that liquidated and settled the president's power of removal. When the first Congress met in 1789, one of its first tasks was to establish the first executive departments, and with them the first department heads. Under the Constitution, those officers had to be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The question before Congress was how those officers were to be removed. Madison contended that removal was part of the executive power vested in the president, which the legislature has no right to diminish or modify. It is only with that power, he explained, that the chain of dependence can be preserved. The lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest made to depend as they ought on the president, and the president on the community. Madison emerged victorious, and Congress's confirmation of the president's power gained fame as the decision of 1789. Chief Justice Barshall described the decision as a full expression of the sense of the legislature, and early presidents of all persuasions agreed. What text, history, and structure settle, the court's precedent confirms. The president may remove his subordinates at will. As early as 1839, the court reaffirmed what the first Congress had held. It was very early adopted as the practical construction of the Constitution, the court noted, that the power to remove where the tenure of the office was not fixed by the Constitution was vested in the President alone. The court's landmark decision in Myers confirmed the president's power to fire his subordinates at will. The case arose when President Wilson fired Frank Myers, the postmaster in Portland, Oregon, without consulting the Senate, notwithstanding an 1876 statute that required the President to receive the advice and consent of the Senate, not only to appoint postmasters, but also to remove them. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Taft noted that in the wake of the political differences following the Civil War between President Johnson, a Jacksonian Democrat, and Congressional Republicans, Congress had sought to curtail the then-acknowledged powers of the President with the Tenure of Office Act. Under that law, the President was required to receive the Senate's consent before firing most officers. The injury and invalidity of the Act was immediately recognized by the executive and objected to, and not just by President Johnson, but by General Grant, who succeeded him. What these events revealed, Chief Justice Taft wrote, was a consistent presidential rejection of the validity of such legislation as incompatible with the legislative action of 1789. The law concerning Postmasters thus raised the question whether to set aside the first Congress's construction, thus buttressed and adopt an adverse view contrary to the Constitution's text, history, and structure. The court refused to do so, and instead hewed to the constitutional construction reached by the first Congress and acquiesced in by the whole government for three-quarters of a century. Nine years after Myers, the court decided Humphreys Executor versus United States. Humphreys arose when President Roosevelt fired an FTC commissioner without specifying a cause for his removal, contrary to a statute permitting removal only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. The court ruled against President Roosevelt, distinguishing Myers by explaining that some presidentially appointed officials may perform executive functions, but exercise no part of the executive power, and holding that the FDC's duties were neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative. Because these quasi-functions did not require the use of executive power, the court reasoned, Humphrey needed to answer only to Congress and the courts. Humphreys' framework has not withstood the test of time. From the start, Humphreys was tethered to a highly circumscribed view of the FTC's role. Humphreys, by its terms, applied only to agencies that occupy no place in the executive department, are independent of executive authority, and exercise no part of the executive power. Indeed, the court took pains to emphasize that the character of the office, executive or non-executive, would determine the result of future cases. In later cases, the court concluded that more functions fell on the executive side of that line and thus within the president's exclusive control. Soon enough, the court recognized that Humphreys flunked even its own test. It is hard to dispute that the powers of the FTFC, even at the time of Humphreys' executor, the court explained in 1988, would at the present time be considered executive at least to some degree. In Free Enterprise Fund versus Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 561 U.S. 477, a Supreme Court case from 2010, and Sale of Law, LLC versus Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U.S. 197, a Supreme Court case from 2020, the court reiterated Meyer's rule that the president exercises general administrative control of those executing the laws and must be able to remove those for whom he cannot continue to be responsible. And the court refused to extend Humphreys to new situations. At this point, all that is left of Humphreys is its observation that an agency that exercises no part of the executive power need not fall within the rule of presidential removal. If anything more is left of Humphreys, the court overrules it. Humphreys has, for decades, been a result in search of a rationale and every relevant factor to Starry's ISIS. The quality of the decision's reasoning, its consistency with the court's other cases, the workability of its rule, and reliance interests counsels in favor of letting Humphreys go. Slaughter relies on reliance. She argues that Congress has relied upon Humphreys to create agencies that are insulated from presidential control. But that is precisely the problem. Despite what Humphreys may say, independent agencies are not independent in the sense that they are free of the president and thus responsive only to the people of the United States. Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy freedom for presidential oversight and protection does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance. It often results only in an increased subservience to congressional direction. With these principles in mind, the FTC's four-cause removal provision violates the separation of powers. In its present form, the FTC enforces and administers some 80 statutes covering almost every facet of the nation's economy, and the tasks it undertakes are the very essence of execution of the law. The FTC has the power to promulgate substantive rules carrying the force of law, investigate businesses and enforce statutes through in-house adjudications, and file civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court. The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power and must therefore be controlled by the chief executive. Because the FTC's activities fall well within the heartland of executive power, the court has no occasion today to define the bounds of what such power entails. Not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive power. And the court has left open the possibility that some functions traditionally handled outside the executive branch may not be encompassed by Meyer's general rule. One example the court has given of such an entity is the Federal Reserve, to the extent that it follows in the tradition of the first and second banks of the United States. And as the government recognizes, the permissibility of tenure protections for non-Article III courts is not presented or briefed in this case. The court leaves those questions for another day. All the court does today is recognize what has been clear for a century that those who fall within the president's general administrative control must be removable by the president at will. Slaughter's counter-arguments are rejected. She relies on Humphreys and Starry Decisis, but she does not defend Humphreys on its own terms. She does not argue that the FTC today occupies no place in the executive department or exercises no part of the executive power. Her historical arguments regarding early multi-member agencies fail because the members of these agencies too were removable by the president at will. Slaughter ultimately proposes that the court police Congress's decisions in this area only for reasonableness. She argues that Congress may reasonably decide that the president should be able to remove some duly appointed officers only for certain causes and through certain processes. Slaughter's proposed limiting principle is neither limiting nor much of a principle. On her view, Congress could commandeer the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, most, if not all, of the Department of Justice, and a number of other agencies besides. Indeed, if Slaughter were correct, then it is not clear why Congress would need to allow the President any say in firings at all. Slaughter's view is incompatible with our constitutional design. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then and only then can they remain accountable to the President and the President to the people. Reversed and remanded, Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the court in which Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined, and in which Justice Thomas joined as to all but part 3b. Justice Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion in which Justices Kagan and Jackson joined. Thank you for listening. Please help us by rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and make sure you subscribe so you can get all of the OT 25 decisions, the ones that will be coming down on Tuesday, June 30th to finish the term, automatically delivered to your device. If you wish to communicate with the podcast, please email us at Scotusdecisions at gmail.com or click the link in the show notes. Thanks so much and have a great day.