Supreme Court Overturns Humphrey's Executor, Lets Trump Fire FTC Commissioner — But Blocks Fed Governor Firing (June 2026)

What Happened

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down two companion rulings on the same day, both testing how far a president can reach into agencies Congress designed to be insulated from direct political control. One ruling overturned a 90-year-old precedent; the other, by a 5-4 vote, narrowly held a second guardrail in place.

Trump v. Slaughter: Humphrey's Executor Overturned

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ruled 6-3 that for-cause removal protections for Federal Trade Commission commissioners violate the separation of powers. The decision upholds Trump's March 2025 firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter (Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya was removed at the same time), who had been appointed to a term Congress structured so that commissioners could only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" — not at the president's political discretion.

That protection dated to Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), which for nearly a century has been the doctrinal foundation allowing Congress to create independent regulatory agencies — bodies meant to apply expertise and law rather than serve as extensions of the White House. The Court's ruling does not merely resolve Slaughter's individual case; it overturns Humphrey's Executor itself, eliminating the removal protections it guaranteed. Because other agencies — including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board — are structured on the same model, the ruling's reach potentially extends across a large share of the independent regulatory state, giving the president unilateral removal power over officials Congress deliberately insulated from direct political pressure.

The Companion Case: Fed Governor Lisa Cook

The same day, the Court separately ruled 5-4 (Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh and Jackson; Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett dissenting) that Trump lacks authority to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her lawsuit challenging his attempted removal proceeds through the courts, rejecting his request to stay a lower court order that had reinstated her. Cook had been targeted based on a mortgage-fraud accusation lodged by a Trump-appointed official; Cook says the accusation was pretextual retaliation for her refusal to bow to political pressure over interest-rate policy.

Notably, the Court did not extend the Slaughter holding to the Federal Reserve. It left the ultimate question of whether the president can remove a Fed governor at will formally unresolved — "for now." The Cook ruling is a partial judicial check that held, not a defeat for the removal-power theory: the same legal argument that succeeded against the FTC is being actively tested against the one agency whose independence from short-term political pressure over monetary policy is widely regarded as economically load-bearing for the entire country.

Legal Analysis

The Significance of Overturning Humphrey's Executor

Humphrey's Executor has stood for nearly 90 years as the constitutional basis for the modern independent agency — the FTC, the NLRB, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and dozens of other bodies Congress structured to apply technical and legal judgment insulated from direct presidential control. Overturning it does not just resolve one commissioner's job; it removes the doctrinal wall that separated "independent agency" from "executive branch subordinate." Agencies built on the same for-cause removal model as the FTC — including the NLRB and MSPB — are now exposed to the same reasoning, meaning a sitting president can potentially replace commissioners and board members at will whenever their rulings become politically inconvenient. The holding is the Court's constitutional judgment, not misconduct by the President; under it, the Slaughter removal was lawful. What this entry documents as conduct is the attempted removal of Governor Cook.

The Fed-Independence Question and the Pretextual Firing of Lisa Cook

The Cook ruling should be read honestly as what it is: a check that survived, not an executive-overreach success. The Court declined to extend Slaughter's logic to the Federal Reserve, at least for now, and Cook remains in her seat while her case proceeds. But the underlying harm is the attempt itself. Cook was targeted using a mortgage-fraud allegation from a Trump-appointed official, raised at the specific moment she was resisting political pressure to lower interest rates — a sequence Cook's suit characterizes as pretextual retaliation rather than good-faith law enforcement. Central bank independence from short-term political demands over monetary policy is widely regarded by economists as essential to controlling inflation and maintaining market confidence in the dollar; Cook's suit alleges that the administration manufactured cause to remove a governor who would not comply. The Court's refusal to resolve the question "for now" means the theory remains live, and the attempted firing, which Cook alleges used pretextual cause to punish an independent official for resisting presidential policy preferences, is the conduct at issue in this entry.