In one ruling, the Supreme Court wiped out a 91-year-old precedent, nullified a 112-year-old law, and handed Donald Trump the power to fire the heads of independent federal agencies for any reason or no reason at all. The case was called Trump v Slaughter, and the name aged like fine wine. Congress built these agencies. Congress staffed them. Congress passed laws protecting them. The Supreme Court just told Congress to go sit in the corner.
What Actually Happened Here
On Monday, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey's Executor, a precedent that has governed the relationship between Congress and independent federal agencies since 1935. The ruling came in Trump v Slaughter, a case that grew out of Donald Trump's 2025 firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Trump fired her without cause. Congress had passed a law saying you can't do that. The Court said, essentially: that law doesn't count anymore.
As The Guardian reports, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that any agency exercising "executive" powers must be fully under the president's control, meaning Trump can now replace agency leadership with political loyalists whenever he feels like it. The Federal Trade Commission Act, signed into law 112 years ago, is effectively dead. The independent agency structure that Congress spent a century carefully constructing can now be dismantled one firing at a time.
There is one carve-out, and it tells you everything about what this Court actually cares about. The Federal Reserve is exempt. The justices mumbled something about the Fed's long "tradition" of independence and left it at that. The FTC has existed for 112 years, but apparently that tradition wasn't long enough. The Fed manages the financial portfolios of the people making this ruling, so we can all draw our own conclusions about the rigor of that distinction.
The 250-Year Argument They Just Declared Over
Let's be clear about the scope of what the Court did. This wasn't a narrow procedural tweak. As The Guardian's Moira Donegan writes, the Court presumed to settle a 250-year-old debate about the limits of presidential authority, and it settled it in the most expansive, pro-executive way imaginable. What had been a live constitutional question since the founding is now, per six justices, simply resolved. The president controls everything executive. Full stop.
Donald Trump, for his part, has not been subtle about his theory of the presidency. He has previously claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want." The Supreme Court's majority opinion in Slaughter does not go quite that far in those exact words, but it's getting warm. Roberts claims the separation of powers requires the president to fully control any body exercising executive functions, which in practice means any agency that does anything.
Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent joined by the Court's two other liberals, was direct about what this actually means. According to The Guardian's account of the dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the majority was "transforming [the president's] duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws." That's not a liberal complaint about a conservative ruling. That's a description of what the text says.
Why This Matters Even If You Don't Know What the FTC Does
Here's the boring civics version, because it matters: the Federal Trade Commission regulates deceptive business practices, antitrust violations, and consumer protection. The Consumer Product Safety Commission keeps toys from killing children. The National Labor Relations Board handles labor disputes. The FEC is supposed to police campaign finance. These agencies exist because Congress decided, over the course of a century, that some functions of government need to be insulated from political pressure to work properly. That was the whole point.
Congress created these agencies. Congress defined their authority. Congress passed laws saying their leaders couldn't be fired for political reasons. The whole structure was a congressional invention, built on congressional authority, and protected by congressional legislation. The Supreme Court has now ruled that the president can ignore the firing protections Congress wrote, because any agency doing "executive" work must be fully under executive control. The reasoning doesn't bother to explain why Congress gets to create these agencies in the first place if it has no power to protect them once they exist.
What this means in practice is that Trump can staff every independent federal agency with loyalists, remove any career official who resists, and ensure that the bodies tasked with regulating Wall Street, protecting consumers, and enforcing labor law are run by people whose first loyalty is to him. As The Guardian notes, this is another in a long line of rulings attacking the "administrative state," that vast network of expert agencies whose unglamorous daily work is what actually makes the federal government function.
The Federal Reserve Exception That Reveals the Game
The Court's decision to carve out the Federal Reserve from this ruling is worth sitting with for a moment. Every other independent agency can now have its leadership fired at will. But the Fed, which controls interest rates and monetary policy and directly affects the value of every investment portfolio in the country, gets to keep its independence because of "tradition."
The FTC has 112 years of tradition. The Federal Reserve has been independent since 1913. If anything, the FTC is older. The distinction the Court drew doesn't survive five minutes of scrutiny, and the majority opinion apparently doesn't try very hard to make it do so. As The Guardian notes, Roberts and company only "sniff unconvincingly" about the Fed's history of central banking independence as a justification. That's it. That's the legal reasoning.
One might observe that Supreme Court justices are not immune to having financial interests, that central bank independence directly affects the value of those interests, and that the Court was extremely motivated to find a principle that protected the Fed while gutting everything else. One might observe that. The Court would presumably prefer you didn't.
Congress Has Been Sent to Its Room
The deeper constitutional problem, beyond the immediate damage to specific agencies, is what this ruling says about the role of Congress itself. The Guardian frames this as the Court once again undermining congressional power, and it's hard to argue otherwise. The constitution Roberts is citing in this ruling is not one where Congress creates agencies, defines their missions, funds their operations, and passes laws governing their leadership, only to have all of that erased by a later president's political preferences.
The framers gave the president a veto over legislation before it becomes law. That's the executive's check on Congress. What the Court invented in Slaughter is something different: the power to nullify laws Congress already passed, at least as they apply to independent agencies. Sotomayor called it a license to defy the very laws the president is constitutionally required to faithfully execute. The framers did not imagine that power. Nobody argued for that power until the modern conservative legal movement decided the administrative state was the enemy.
The Court has now said, in effect, that everyone has been wrong about how executive agencies work for nearly a century. Congress was wrong. Past presidents who deferred to congressional authority were wrong. Past Supreme Courts that upheld those protections were wrong. Only this Court, in 2026, finally figured out the correct answer. That is a remarkable claim. It is also the kind of claim that people who are doing something they know is indefensible tend to make.
The Dingo Take
Let's not pretend this is complicated. The Supreme Court just handed a president who has openly said he believes he can do whatever he wants the legal architecture to staff every independent regulatory agency in the federal government with political loyalists. The body that is supposed to protect consumers from corporate fraud, the body that is supposed to enforce labor law, the body that is supposed to police campaign finance: all of it is now, functionally, an extension of Trump's will. Congress passed laws to prevent exactly this. Those laws are now garbage.
The Federal Reserve exception is the tell. When the Court's financial interests are on the line, suddenly tradition matters and independence is sacred. When it's the agency protecting workers from being cheated or kids from being poisoned by defective products, the 112-year tradition apparently means nothing. This is not constitutional interpretation. This is six people in robes deciding who deserves protection and who doesn't, and it turns out the answer is: the people and institutions with money get protected, everyone else can pound sand.
The question that nobody in the majority answered, because there is no good answer, is this: if Congress has no power to protect the agencies it creates from presidential interference, what exactly is Congress for? Rubber-stamping whatever the executive wants? Passing laws that evaporate the moment a new president decides to ignore them? The Court's answer, delivered with Roberts' customary bloodless confidence, is basically yes. Congress is for the vibes. The president runs everything that matters. This is not the constitutional order the framers designed. It is the constitutional order six Republican-appointed justices decided to build for this particular moment, for this particular president. Future generations will get to sort out the wreckage.
