Supreme Court rules Trump can fire independent agency board members

The case stemmed from Trump's decision to fire FTC member Rebecca Slaughter without cause.

The Supreme Court struck down a federal law that restricts the president's ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding presidential control over independent federal agencies.

The court’s conservative majority voted 6-3 to uphold President Donald Trump's decision to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission who was removed from her position before her term ended. 

The ruling overturns a unanimous 90-year-old decision known as Humphrey’s Executor that has limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision making free of political influence — or leave it with only its shell intact.

The logic of the decision extends to other agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump also has fired board members.

In the Slaughter case, Trump fired her without cause, despite a provision of federal law that requires a reason. Slaughter sued and lower courts ordered her reinstated because the law allows commissioners to be removed only for problems like misconduct or neglect of duty. Chief Justice John Roberts halted those decisions in a brief order, responding to an appeal from the Trump administration on the court’s emergency docket. The order allowed Slaughter and the board members of other agencies to be removed from their jobs even as their legal challenges continued.

The Justice Department argued that the FTC and other executive branch agencies are under Trump’s control and the Republican president is free to remove commissioners without cause. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued the case before the high court, called on the justices to jettison Humphrey’s Executor.

Sauer said the decision “hasn’t withstood the test of time” and had enabled a “headless fourth branch” of government, the administrative state that conservatives and business interests have been taking aim at for decades.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the crux of the issue is that the officials who direct the agencies “are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries” without being accountable to anyone.

Liberal justices warned that a ruling sought by the administration to overturn the decision known as Humphrey’s Executor would give the president, as Justice Elena Kagan said, “massive unchecked, uncontrolled power.”

Agencies that have been in place for a century or more also would be robbed of their expertise, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

“So having a President come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” Jackson said.

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.