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What is Congress for? According to the supreme court, not very much. On Monday, the supreme court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a 91-year-old precedent, nullified the Federal Trade Commission Act, a 112-year-old law, and presumed to settle a 250-year-old debate on the scope of presidential authority when it reapportioned power away from the people’s representatives in the House and Senate and gave it instead to Donald Trump. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled that that the heads of independent agencies that Congress created cannot be protected from arbitrary firings by laws that Congress passed. Instead, Donald Trump is now free to fire agency heads at will and to replace them with political loyalists, regardless of what Congress has said about it.
The ruling has one key exception: Donald Trump does not, according to the justices, have the ability to fire members of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve without cause and without proper procedure. A separate decision found for Lisa Cook, the Joe Biden appointee who was the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and who was fired via social media post by Donald Trump last year. In addition to Cook’s job, the decision protects the independence of the Federal Reserve and the health of financial markets, to say nothing of the considerable personal wealth of the justices themselves.
But the Slaughter decision marks yet another expansion of the president’s power, yet another blow to Congress’ prerogatives, and yet another in a long line of attacks on the court’s favorite bete noir: the “administrative state”, that vast network of independent agencies and commissions, staffed by experts and bureaucrats and dully competent civil servants, whose hard, unglamorous work makes the federal government into a body that can regulate commerce, promote public health and safety, and ensure something like equal dignity and protection to its citizens – rather than the husk of cruelty and hierarchy enforcement that many of the justices would prefer it to be. In that sense, the ruling in Slaughter was grimly predictable, another decision meant to foster incompetence and incapacity in the federal government, inflict suffering and indignity on the American people, and concentrate power in the hands of Donald Trump and the court’s Republican appointees at the expense of constitutional integrity.
At first glance, the stakes of the ruling might seem obscure. On its face, Trump v Slaughter – a case prompted by Donald Trump’s summary and causeless 2025 termination of Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission – is about employment protections for high-ranking government workers, a question that sounds about as thrilling as watching paint dry or chewing on a crust of burnt, unbuttered toast. But the constitutional stakes become clearer when one considers the case in the abstract. The Federal Trade Commission, where Slaughter worked, like all similar independent agencies, was created by an act of Congress. Congress also passed laws about the scope of the agency’s work and wrote legislation protecting its leaders from being fired for political reasons – a move meant to ensure the efficacy and independence of the FTC. It was Congress, that is, that created the agency; Congress that gave it its authority to act; Congress that dictated its prerogatives, shaped its structure and set these forth in law. And now that law, duly signed by the onetime executive, can be disregarded entirely by another president’s whim. Because the supreme court has decided that now, any agency that can be seen to have “executive” powers must be entirely under the executive’s control.
The facile idiocy of the court’s reasoning deserves to be examined in detail. Writing for the majority, chief justice John Roberts claims that the constitution’s “separation of powers” means that all bodies that exercise “executive” powers, such as the FTC, “must therefore be controlled by the chief executive”. (Donald Trump, for his part, has evinced a similar assessment of the scope of presidential authority, claiming that article II executive powers means he has “the right to do whatever I want”.) If this is so, then it is not clear why the Federal Reserve is exempt. In their writing on this matter, the justices only manage to sniff unconvincingly about the Fed’s long “tradition” of central banking independence; I guess the FTC’s 112 years of independence is not long enough.
But the reasoning also overlooks the plain reality of those “separate” powers that the constitution imagines, in which the legislative, executive and judicial branches are afforded different tools to intervene in decidedly overlapping purviews. For instance, the executive, at least in the constitution, is indeed given a power over the legislative process – his power to veto the bills that Congress passes. In fact it is the court that has invented and granted him a whole new power in Slaughter: the power to nullify, ignore or fancifully reimagine the laws that Congress has passed already, at least as far as independent agencies are concerned. In her dissent, joined by the two other liberals, Sonya Sotomayor said that the court 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 a separate and distinct power all right, and it’s also a decidedly new one: the framers of the constitution did not imagine it.
The upshot of this is that according to the court, everyone has been wrong about executive agencies for the better part of 100 years: Congress, the agencies themselves, the past presidents who recognized congressional authority, the past supreme courts and federal courts that had reaffirmed the same, all of them were wrong. Because regardless of the way the law and the balance of constitutional power has been understood for all that time, we are meant to believe, in fact Congress has no power over these agencies – again, agencies that Congress created – and all of the authority instead goes to the president, who can tear up Congress’s laws about these agencies whenever he wants, restaff them whenever he wants, and reorient them towards whatever goals he wants, at will and with no need for just cause or due procedure.
The effectiveness of government will be sacrificed as a result; as will the integrity of federal agencies and the competence of federal workers. Bureaucracy jobs will now increasingly be once again dispensed as favors and cleaned out when a new president comes into office; institutional knowledge and expertise will be purged in favor of political loyalty and back scratching. A “BIG WIN” is how Donald Trump described the ruling on Truth Social. For him, maybe. Not for us.
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