REPORT: Rebecca Slaughter and the FTC — the 91-year-old precedent Trump wants to overturn

An email with no cause, no due process, and no right to appeal

On March 18, 2025, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter learned of her dismissal through a notification. The email, sent by the Office of the White House Staff, informed her that her continued service at the FTC was “inconsistent with the Administration’s priorities.” That was it. No mention of inefficiency. No allegation of negligence. Not a hint of professional misconduct. Yet federal law is explicit: an FTC commissioner may be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or misconduct in office.” None of these conditions are met. The removal is patently illegal.

Slaughter reacted immediately and publicly: “The president has unlawfully removed me from my position as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, violating the very text of the law and clear Supreme Court precedent.” ” Her colleague Alvaro Bedoya, the other Democratic commissioner fired on the same day, was even more direct on social media: “I am a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. The president just illegally fired me. This is corruption, period.” These words are not political rhetoric—they describe a documented legal reality.

The FTC Reduced to a Republican Shell

With the forced departure of Slaughter and Bedoya, the FTC is left with only two Republican commissioners. The commission’s chairman, Andrew Ferguson—appointed by Trump—was quick to defend the legality of the firings and assure that the agency would continue its mission. But a bipartisan commission reduced to a monolithic bloc is no longer bipartisan. It becomes an instrument of a single political agenda. This is precisely what the 1914 law creating the FTC was intended to prevent—no single party may hold more than three of the five seats.

The loss of a quorum or pluralism is not a technicality. The FTC oversees corporate mergers, investigates monopolistic practices, and imposes rules on tech giants. A politicized agency, subject to presidential directives, can no longer play the role of a neutral arbiter. The entire mission of protecting consumers and competition is at stake—not just the personal fate of a Democratic commissioner.

Ferguson said the FTC would continue to “protect consumers.” But protecting consumers with one hand while serving the president’s interests with the other is a contradiction in terms. Independent agencies exist precisely because presidents have friends in the business world. The entire logic of the system is crumbling.

Lower courts resist

Slaughter and Bedoya filed a lawsuit the very next day. On July 17, 2025, Federal Judge Loren AliKhan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in their favor. Her decision was final: Slaughter’s removal was “illegal and without legal effect.” The judge relied directly on Humphrey’s Executor, which “bindingly governs this case.” She ordered Slaughter’s reinstatement and prohibited the other commissioners from interfering with the performance of his duties. The Trump administration immediately announced its intention to appeal.

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed this decision by a 2-to-1 vote. Judges Patricia Millett and Nina Pillard were unequivocal: “The government has little chance of prevailing on appeal, given the binding and directly relevant precedent of the Supreme Court.” ” Judge Neomi Rao—appointed by Trump—dissented, arguing that federal courts likely lack the authority to order the reinstatement of an official removed by the president. The dividing line is clear: on one side, existing law; on the other, the theory of an omnipotent executive branch.

The Supreme Court Steps In

On September 4, 2025, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to stay the reinstatement order on an emergency basis. On September 8, Chief Justice John Roberts granted an administrative stay. On September 22, the Court—by a 6-3 vote—permanently stayed the reinstatement order and agreed to hear the case in its entirety, on an expedited schedule, with oral arguments set for December 2025. The three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented. Kagan wrote that the Court had “effectively overturned” Humphrey’s Executor even before hearing the arguments.

The wording chosen by the Court to frame the debate is revealing: it asks the parties to address not only whether the FTC’s legal protections violate the separation of powers, but also “whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States should be overturned.” By framing the question this way, the Court makes it clear that it is seriously considering going beyond simply resolving the Slaughter case—and overturning the precedent itself.

Kagan’s dissent sticks in my mind. To write that the Court has “effectively overturned” a 91-year-old precedent without a hearing, without arguments, on its emergency docket—that is a serious accusation coming from such a rigorous justice. She is saying, in essence: we’re already deciding the outcome; let’s not delude ourselves about the process.

Questions That Reveal Beliefs

On December 8, 2025, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter. Observers who expected feigned neutrality are in for a surprise. Chief Justice John Roberts describes Humphrey’s Executor as “a dried-up shell of what people once thought it was.” He adds that the decision “concerned an agency that had very little, if any, executive power”—and that this may be why it garnered such broad support at the time. His words are not those of a judge seeking to understand. They are those of a judge seeking to justify a conclusion already reached.

Solicitor General Sauer urges the Court to overturn Humphrey’s Executor outright, asserting that Article II of the Constitution grants the president unconditional supervisory authority over executive officers. Slaughter’s attorney, Amit Agarwal, counters that overturning “a century of precedent at this late stage” would be a “profound destabilization of institutions now inextricably woven into the fabric of American governance.” Slaughter herself, present in the courtroom, observes that the Court’s conservative justices seem largely untroubled by this argument.

The systemic issue: from the FTC to the Fed

What makes the case explosive is its potential scope. Humphrey’s Executor protects not only FTC commissioners, but also those of the SEC, FERC, NLRB, MSPB, CPSC, and EEOC. Looming in the background is the issue of the Federal Reserve—whose Governor Lisa Cook Trump has simultaneously attempted to remove. The Fed occupies a different constitutional position, and global financial markets have reacted nervously to every development in this case. The signals sent by the Court in Trump v. Cook seem, for now, to be aimed at preserving the central bank’s independence—but nothing is set in stone.

The analysis by the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke is blunt: a ruling overturning Humphrey’s Executor would be “a major earthquake for agencies that have previously operated independently.” This is no trivial metaphor. It would be the most radical reorganization of the U.S. executive branch since the New Deal—achieved not through legislation, but by a judicial decision of nine unelected individuals.

Roberts said that Humphrey’s Executor is “a dried-up shell.” But what he calls a shell is the legal protection that allows the SEC to prosecute Wall Street without the president’s approval; it is the framework that allows the NLRB to arbitrate labor disputes without facing direct political pressure. A dried-up shell, really? Or the bulwark that some find too troublesome?

A Reagan-era doctrine now in power

The Trump administration’s central argument rests on the theory of the unitary executive: Article II of the Constitution states that “the executive Power shall be vested in the President.” According to this interpretation, the president must have total control over all officials who exercise executive power—and that control includes the right to fire them at will. This doctrine did not originate with Trump. It emerged in the corridors of the Department of Justice under Reagan in the 1980s, championed by young conservative legal scholars determined to refocus executive power—among them, a certain John Roberts, then deputy counsel to the White House.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia had stood alone in advocating this position in a 1988 dissenting opinion (Morrison v. Olson), which his colleagues rejected by a 7-1 vote. But conservative legal scholars never abandoned this cause. Forty years later, that lone dissenting opinion is on the verge of becoming the prevailing doctrine. The Yale Journal on Regulation summarizes the issue: if the president can remove the heads of independent agencies at will, dozens of regulatory bodies—from the FTC to the SEC, including the NLRB and the FERC—will lose their structural independence.

The Constitutional Critique: A “Fabricated” Theory

But the theory of the unitary executive, in its absolute form, is not without contradictions. Constitutional scholar Caleb Nelson, cited in the Brennan Center’s analysis, notes that “the text and history of Article II are far more ambiguous than the current Court suggests.” More specifically, the “Take Care” clause—which requires the president to ensure the proper execution of laws—“does not imply that the president must be able to dismiss all executive officers at will, nor does it guarantee him the right to imprison officers who do not do as he says.” The logic has its limits.

Justice Elena Kagan put it bluntly during the oral arguments in December 2025: a ruling in Trump’s favor “would place massive, unchecked, and uncontrolled power in the hands of the president.” This is not hyperbole—it is institutional arithmetic. A president who can fire, without cause, the heads of the SEC, the NLRB, the FTC, the FERC, and the EEOC effectively controls the regulation of financial markets, labor rights, competition, and energy. This is no longer an executive branch—it is an elective monarchy.

I am not a constitutionalist. But I know the difference between a legal argument and an ideological construct disguised as a legal argument. The theory of the unitary executive in its absolute form is a political weapon forged during the Reagan years to seize power—not a neutral reading of constitutional history. The proponents of this theory were motivated, from the outset, by a specific political agenda.

A Journey Shaped by History

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was born on August 6, 1981. A lawyer by training, she served as legal counsel to the Senate before being appointed FTC commissioner by Trump himself in 2018—a juicy detail the administration prefers to ignore. She was reappointed by Biden in 2023 for a second term running through 2029. Her dismissal in March 2025 makes her the first FTC commissioner to be fired since 1933—since FDR attempted to fire Humphrey. The historical circle is complete, and clearly intentional.

Slaughter recounted the moment of her dismissal with spine-chilling precision: she was at her neighborhood elementary school when the notification arrived. The next day, her access to the FTC buildings was cut off, and her work devices were deactivated. She fought back nonetheless—in court, in front of cameras, and in the pages of newspapers. Her key phrase, repeated tirelessly: “The president is not above the law.” She also warned: if a president can fabricate a fictitious reason to fire a protected official, then “for cause” protections no longer have any real value.

A Woman Who Briefly Returned to Her Office

Following Judge AliKhan’s ruling on July 17, 2025, Slaughter returned to her office at the FTC at 9 a.m. the next morning. She described that moment with quiet emotion: “It was really, really wonderful to be back.” A few days later, the appeals court stayed the ruling. She returned home. On September 2, the appeals court ruled in her favor again. She returned. On September 8, Roberts issued another stay. On September 22, the Supreme Court put an end to her interim appointment. Slaughter left—and this time, it was for good, at least until the final verdict.

This sequence of successive returns and removals illustrates the deeply political nature of the case. The legal battles have swung back and forth in response to institutional pressures, not according to stable principles. What Slaughter embodies today is less an individual case than a symbol: the resistance of the rule of law in the face of an executive branch that believes itself to be unlimited. Her fight has reached the nation’s highest court, where the outcome seems—alas—largely a foregone conclusion.

I have respect for this woman. Not because she is a Democrat. But because she returned to her office the morning after being reinstated, did her job, and never pretended that the situation was normal. In a context where many people choose to capitulate under pressure, there is something remarkable about this quiet tenacity.

An Ideologically Reconfigured Court

The current Supreme Court is the most conservative it has been in decades. With a 6-3 majority, it has already reshaped the law on abortion (Dobbs, 2022), gun rights, administrative deference (overturning Chevron in 2024), and presidential immunity (Trump v. United States, 2024). In each case, the official reasoning was constitutional. In each case, the political outcome benefited the conservative agenda. Trump v. Slaughter follows the same pattern.

The Court’s decision to accept the case on an expedited basis—certiorari before judgment, bypassing the appellate court’s review of the merits—is itself a signal. This is not the normal procedure. It is not the approach of an uncertain Court that wants to let the judicial process run its course. It is a proactive intervention by a Court that wants to rule on a matter of principle that it has already decided in its own mind. The September 8 emergency order—in which Roberts, acting alone, suspended Slaughter’s reinstatement even before the Court agreed to hear the case—speaks volumes about the Court’s true intentions.

A decision is expected by the end of June 2026

As of June 23, 2026, the decision has not yet been issued—but it is imminent. According to the Minnesota Lawyer, The Federalist, and U.S. News & World Report, the Court is expected to rule before the end of its term, set for late June or early July 2026. Observers closest to the case—constitutional lawyers, analysts at SCOTUSblog, and journalists at Law Dork—agree on one point: the conservative majority will most likely overturn Humphrey’s Executor, or decisively weaken it. The questions posed by Roberts and the other conservatives during the December oral arguments leave little doubt as to the outcome.

What remains uncertain is the extent of the overturn. The Court could limit itself to stating that the current FTC—which exercises more executive functions than it did in 1935—no longer falls under the protection of Humphrey’s Executor, without formally overturning the precedent. Or it could go all the way and invalidate the entire doctrine. The second option would be cataclysmic for all independent agencies. The first would be a tactical victory for Trump—but would open the door to a gradual rollback, agency by agency.

Roberts’s argument that the FTC of 2025 is no longer the FTC of 1935—because it now exercises more executive functions—is technically interesting. But it amounts to saying: we will respect the precedent to the letter while gutting it in spirit. It’s constitutional surgery with a scalpel. The practical result will be the same: Slaughter is fired, and the independent agencies are weakened.

An institutional framework designed to withstand political pressure

The rationale behind independent agencies rests on a simple principle: certain regulatory decisions are too technical and too sensitive to be left to the political cycle. The FTC decides whether a merger between two tech giants is anti-competitive. The SEC decides whether an investment bank has manipulated markets. The NLRB mediates disputes between employers and unions. These decisions have massive economic consequences, and those who benefit directly from them often have the White House’s ear. Hence the need for an institutional firewall: commissioners with fixed terms, removable only for serious misconduct, accountable not to the president but to Congress and the public.

This model is not perfect. Agencies have their biases, their gray areas, and their bureaucratic excesses. The conservative criticism that they constitute an unelected and unaccountable “deep state” is not entirely without merit. But the answer to these excesses is not to subject them to executive control—it is to reform them through legislation, with Congress’s approval. Giving the president the power to fire any regulator who upsets his billionaire friends is not reform. It is capitulation.

The dominoes that could fall

If “Humphrey’s Executor” is overturned in its entirety, the list of potentially vulnerable agencies is staggering. The FERC regulates energy. The NLRB protects union rights. The CPSC oversees the safety of consumer products. The EEOC enforces anti-discrimination laws. The MSPB protects civil servants from arbitrary dismissals. All these agencies share one characteristic: they have at times made decisions contrary to the interests of large corporations with close ties to the Republican Party. With a president capable of purging them at will, that independence disappears.

The only exception the Court seems willing to make concerns the Federal Reserve—and solely because global financial markets would deliver their verdict immediately if the Fed’s independence were compromised. This is an extraordinary admission: the U.S. Supreme Court would be willing to make a constitutional exception for the central bank not out of legal principle, but out of fear of the markets’ reaction. If this is the court’s constitutional compass, it is understandable why observers speak of a “pro-business” Court rather than a pro-Constitution one.

I’m going to say something unpopular: the U.S. Supreme Court, in its current configuration, no longer reasons entirely in terms of the law. It reasons in terms of power. It accepted this case on an emergency basis; it allowed Slaughter to be fired before even hearing the arguments; it posed questions in a way that prejudges the outcome. This is not an independent court examining a difficult case. It is an institution advancing a political agenda.

Duration as a Constitutional Argument

In American law, the age of a precedent is not without significance. The principle of stare decisis—upholding past decisions—rests on a simple idea: legal stability is a value in and of itself. Individuals, businesses, and governments base their conduct on existing rules. Overturning a 91-year-old precedent does not merely change the law—it undermines confidence in the permanence of the law itself. Authors in the Yale Law Review and the Harvard Law Review have devoted entire articles to the impact of such an overturn on the doctrine of stare decisis.

More specifically, in cases involving the overturning of precedent, the Supreme Court has traditionally required “exceptional circumstances”—a change in social or economic realities, a practical impossibility of upholding the rule, or a clearly demonstrated error. Yet, in the Slaughter case, none of these criteria is truly met. Independent agencies are functioning. The FTC is fulfilling its role. It is not the case law that has proven unmanageable—it is a president who does not want independent agencies.

The Slow Death of a Shield

Analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork describes the potential dismantling of Humphrey’s Executor as “tearing down the dam that has enabled expertise within the government as the federal government has grown and become more complex—in economics, but also in science, health, and security.” That is an accurate characterization. Independent agencies are not unpredictable bureaucratic outgrowths. They are the institutional response to the growth of the federal government since the New Deal—a response designed to maintain expertise and continuity in the face of political shifts.

The Brown Goldstein Levy website published an analysis titled “Humphrey’s Executor and the Quiet Death of Stare Decisis” (September 2025), pointing out that the Court had already, in practice, treated the precedent as dead even before officially burying it. By allowing Trump to remove Slaughter from the docket on an emergency basis, while Humphrey’s Executor was still the law, the Court signaled: the rule is no longer valid, even though we have not yet formally repealed it. This is a form of governance by circumvention that deserves to be called out for what it is.

Ninety-one years. I find that number telling. The United States has weathered the Great Depression, a world war, the atomic age, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, 9/11—and throughout it all, the rule has held. It has held not because it is perfect, but because no one had dared to challenge it with such blatant brutality. Until now.

Independent Institutions: The Backbone of Democracies

What is happening in the United States is not an American anomaly. It reflects a major trend affecting several Western democracies: the undermining of independent institutions by executive branches that claim to have a “popular mandate.” In Hungary, Orbán has brought the media, the courts, and regulatory authorities to heel. In Poland, the Duda government had set out to subordinate the judiciary to the executive branch before the trend was reversed. In Turkey, Erdogan has carried out massive purges within institutions since 2016. The common thread is the same: independent institutions are portrayed as obstacles to the will of the people, when in fact they are precisely what protects citizens from abuses of power.

The West must remain the center of the world not because it is ethnically or culturally superior, but because it embodies—albeit imperfectly—a model of governance based on the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the independence of oversight institutions. When the United States, the pillar of this edifice, begins to erode these principles, the entire credibility of the Western model is undermined—in the face of Russia, China, and authoritarian regimes that lie in wait for the slightest crack.

Trump: A Necessary Evil That Undermines the Foundations

Donald Trump is a political reality with which the West must contend. His firm stance on certain issues—pressuring NATO to make Europeans shoulder their own defense, his uncompromising trade stance toward China—addresses real needs. But there is a limit to what a democracy can tolerate in the name of political effectiveness. When a president dismantles independent institutions—not to correct their shortcomings but to subject them to his whims—he is no longer governing a democracy. He is undermining it from within.

America’s allies are watching this unfold with growing anxiety. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan: all these nations have built their relationships with Washington on the assumption of a certain degree of American institutional stability. A White House that controls the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, the CPSC, and potentially the Fed is no longer a predictable partner—it is a centralized entity whose economic and regulatory decisions depend on a single man.

I am pro-West to the core. I believe that liberal democratic values are the best humanity has produced. That is precisely why I refuse to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the United States. This is not an external attack on American democracy. It is a methodical, internal erosion, driven by an elected president and endorsed by a Supreme Court that should be its bulwark.

Elena Kagan, Guardian of the Law

In this case, the dissenting opinions of the progressive justices deserve to be quoted in full, as they articulate precisely what the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor means. Elena Kagan, one of the Court’s most rigorous jurists, wrote in a dissenting opinion in the September 22, 2025, order that the Court had “effectively overturned” the precedent by allowing Trump to fire Slaughter even before arguments were heard. She described agencies such as the FTC as “classic independent commissions: bipartisan, with staggered terms, and protected from removal without cause.” By using the emergency docket to circumvent existing law, the majority had “entrusted total control of all such agencies to the president.”

During oral arguments in December, Kagan took the logic to its conclusion: if the president can fire any commissioner at will, he can fire the FBI director, the head of the DEA, administrative law judges—anyone who performs an “executive” function. She called this “a massive, unchecked, and uncontrolled power in the hands of the president.” Her colleagues Sotomayor and Jackson joined her in dissenting at every stage.

Lawyers and Organizations Opposing the Ruling

Beyond the Court, resistance has organized. The Brennan Center for Justice has published detailed analyses of the unconstitutionality of the firings, citing Benjamin Franklin’s warning that the executive branch would grow until it “ends up as a monarchy.” The Economic Policy Institute has documented, on a day-to-day basis, the impact of the firings on the effective functioning of the agencies concerned. Dozens of constitutional law scholars—among the most eminent at American universities—have filed amicus briefs arguing for the preservation of Humphrey’s Executor. The challenge is academically and legally sound. But given the Court’s current composition, it is not enough.

There is something unsettling about seeing leading legal scholars, backed by decades of legal doctrine and solid precedents, present flawless arguments—and knowing that it will likely make no difference. The current Court has made its decision. The arguments now serve only to fuel dissenting opinions, which may in turn fuel future majorities. It’s a long game. A very long one.

Workers, Consumers, Markets

If Humphrey’s Executor is overturned or significantly weakened, the practical consequences go beyond constitutional theory. The FTC, which can no longer freely investigate the practices of tech giants without fear of a presidential purge. The NLRB, which can no longer arbitrate labor disputes without facing pressure from the White House. The CPSC, which can no longer remove dangerous products from the market if their manufacturer is a friend of the president. These scenarios are not hypothetical—they follow directly from the logic of absolute presidential control.

For American workers, this marks the end of a neutral arbiter in disputes with employers. For consumers, it marks the end of an agency that can take action against Amazon or Google without looking over its shoulder. For financial markets, it means—with the exception of the Fed—the introduction of permanent political uncertainty into every regulatory decision. Foreign companies, institutional investors, and international trading partners will now have to factor in a new variable: U.S. regulation can change at the whim of the president.

A Precedent for Aspiring Dictators

The geopolitical impact of this reversal should not be underestimated. Authoritarian regimes—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—are closely watching the health of Western democracies. Every time a democracy frees its executive branch from institutional oversight, it offers implicit legitimacy to regimes that have always claimed that the separation of powers is a bourgeois fiction. A Putin or a Xi Jinping doesn’t need grand speeches—all they have to do is point to Washington and say, “Look, they do it too.”

It is in this context that the Slaughter v. Trump case takes on global significance. The issue is not merely whether a Democratic commissioner can remain in office until 2029. It is about whether the United States—the world’s leading democracy and the guardian of liberal institutions since 1945—will send the signal that an elected president can dismantle the institutional checks and balances of his own government with no justification other than his own will. That is the signal our adversaries have been waiting for.

I’m not naive about American politics. The United States has always had tensions between the executive branch and independent institutions. But there’s a fundamental difference between these normal tensions and what’s happening today. What’s happening today is a systemic, planned, and judicially sanctioned challenge to the system. It’s different. And yes, it worries me—not just for Americans, but for all of us.

A Vote That Will Define a Generation

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, expected by the end of June 2026, will be one of the most significant in recent American constitutional history. Perhaps even more significant than Dobbs—because it concerns not an individual right but the very structure of the federal government. If the six conservative justices choose to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, they will upend the architecture of independent agencies built since the New Deal. They will give the U.S. president a level of control over the regulation of the economy, labor, the environment, and financial markets that has been unprecedented since 1935. And they will retroactively legitimize decades of ideological construction of a theory—the unitary executive—that has never been approved by Congress or by the American people.

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter fought tenaciously and with dignity. She won in district court. She won in the court of appeals. She lost in the Supreme Court—not because her case was weak, but because the Court decided, even before hearing the arguments, to let Trump proceed. She summed up what was at stake with remarkable clarity: “I was the first FTC commissioner to be removed since 1933. FDR had tried it, and the Supreme Court, unanimously, had ruled it illegal.” That unanimity is a thing of the past. What comes next is part of the history we are living through.

What the West Must Learn

Europe, Canada, and allied democracies must learn a lesson from this sequence of events: the independence of institutions is not defended solely by constitutional texts. It is defended through constant political vigilance, through a civic culture that condemns institutional abuses, and through judges who stand firm even under pressure. When these three pillars weaken simultaneously, 91-year-old precedents no longer hold. Democracy is not a stable state—it is a dynamic balance that requires continuous effort. The Slaughter case reminds us that this effort can falter, even in the world’s oldest democracy.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist