Supreme Court Affirms Presidential Power To Fire Executive Agency Officials At Will

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court confirmed that independent agency officials who exercise executive power serve at the President’s pleasure and may be removed without cause.  In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a 91-year-old case restricting the President’s right to remove such officials and opened the door for President Trump to remove other executive agency officials as he wishes.    

The dispute in Trump v. Slaughter arose after the President’s 2025 removal of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter for the stated reason that her continued service was “inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities.”  Slaughter filed suit, claiming that her removal was unconstitutional, among other things, and that the President could only remove her by statute for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.  In the decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court held that the FTC Act’s restrictions on the president’s power to remove FTC Commissioners was contrary to the separation of powers.  Citing Article II of the Constitution, the Court explained that the executive power is vested in the president and stated simply: “[T]he President may remove his subordinates at will.” 

Overruling 91 Years of Precedent

With this decision, the Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor, 295 U.S. 602, decided in 1935, arguing that Humphrey’s had all but been overruled already.  In Humphrey’s, President Roosevelt fired President Hoover’s appointee to the FTC mid-term.  The Humphrey’s court ruled that the president could not remove FTC officials because their functions were not executive in nature, but rather quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative, and therefore, they answered to Congress and the courts.  The Slaughter majority criticized Humphrey’s, saying that its predecessors took a “highly circumscribed and almost fictional” view of the FTC’s role, which it concluded is undoubtedly executive in nature.  Thus, because the president must be fully accountable for the executive branch officials who serve under him, he must be able to remove them at will. 

The Court declined to define the limits of the presidential power to remove executive officers, but explicitly said it was not determining the fate of officials not before it. 

In a 49-page dissent, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the Slaughter majority’s decision as giving “the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.”

On the same day, the Court decided Slaughter, it also handed down a decision regarding Federal Reserve Member Lisa Cook, who Trump also attempted to fire in 2025.  The Court said Cook would be permitted to remain in her job while her challenge to her removal proceeds.  Trump’s termination of Cook marked the first time a Federal Reserve governor had been fired in the Fed’s 111-year history.

Key Takeaways for Employers

Since taking office, President Trump has attempted to assert dominance over various federal agency heads by firing individuals at the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Merit Systems Protection Board.  With the Slaughter decision, employers should expect that federal government policies and precedent concerning employment matters will shift more often depending on the president and his priorities, further exacerbating the likelihood of regulatory “flip-flopping.”

-Law Clerk Chauncey Bellamy contributed to this post.