The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 overturned 90 years of precedent to end the independence of multimember regulatory agencies in a decision made in the case of Trump v. Slaughter, allowing the president to fire any agency member for any reason.
The stunning, yet predicted, decision hands Donald Trump the power to control every regulatory agency in the executive branch, a key plank of his Project 2025 agenda.
Historical Context and the End of For-Cause Removal
Congress created multimember agencies to be independent of presidential control by only allowing the president to fire them for cause — not for policy disagreements. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld for-cause removal protections in Humphrey’s Executor v. Federal Trade Commission. This enshrined the progressive era idea that the administrative state should be insulated from the political whims of the executive and legislative branches. But now those protections are gone after the Supreme Court’s six conservatives affirmed the long-held goal of the conservative legal movement in their decision. The case came before the court after Trump fired FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee, in March 2025, along with commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, for no stated reason.
Unitary Executive Theory Enshrined
In overturning Humphrey’s Executor, the conservative justices have enshrined the unitary executive theory, which holds that all executive power is vested in the president alone, as the law of the land. This marks a move away from the balance of power created by Congress when it enacted the for-cause removal protections and a move towards autocratic presidential control.
This has been the primary objective of the second Trump presidency. Since retaking office, Trump has pushed the boundaries of the balance of powers and the independence of the administrative state by claiming it is his constitutional right to dictate everything from prosecutions at the Department of Justice to regulations and investigations at bodies overseeing everything from universities to finance, including his own companies. It also happens to dovetail with a longstanding project of the conservative judiciary.
Scope of Presidential Control and the Federal Reserve Carve-Out
Trump will now be able to officially control every regulatory body in the executive branch by threatening removal for any disagreement. That is with one exception: the Federal Reserve. The majority opinion was careful to craft an apparent carve-out for the central bank to insulate it — and, therefore, markets — from direct presidential control despite there being no real legal, historical or constitutional reason to do so.
The Federal Reserve carve-out highlights the fault lines in the high court’s unitary executive theory and shows that it weighs other considerations, like economic stability, rather than its claims of strict constitutional observance. It also comes as Trump has waged a war to seize control of the Fed by attempting to fire Governor Lisa Cook and launching a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. A judge blocked that investigation from continuing on March 13.
