The White House Just Became the Boss of the Referees

On June 29, the Supreme Court did more than let President Trump fire a Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner. In Trump v. Slaughter¹, the Court held that the FTC’s “for-cause” removal protection violates the Constitution’s separation of powers and overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States², the 1935 precedent that had allowed Congress to shield certain independent commissioners from being fired simply because the president disliked their policy views.

That sounds like constitutional inside baseball. It is not. Removal power means the president’s power to dismiss officials. For-cause protection means Congress’s instruction that an official can be removed only for specified reasons, such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. A precedent is an earlier court decision that later courts treat as controlling unless they overrule it. The administrative state is the web of federal agencies that turns statutes into rules, investigations, licenses, enforcement cases and benefits. Separation of powers is the constitutional allocation of authority among Congress, the president and the courts. The question now is what happens when agencies built to be somewhat insulated from the White House learn that insulation no longer protects their leaders.

My answer is blunt: this will weaken independent agencies in the places where independence matters most. It will not make them stupid. It will not erase statutes. It will not make every commissioner a puppet. But it will change the incentives inside agencies that act as market referees, labor umpires, communications licensors, securities cops and election-rule administrators. A regulator who can be fired for policy divergence will hear the president’s preferences in every close call.

The Court’s facts make that point hard to wave away. The FTC Act created a five-member commission with seven-year terms and a removal limit allowing the president to remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” according to the Slaughter syllabus¹. Soon after Trump began his second term in January 2025, he fired Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the FTC’s two Democratic appointees, without identifying any statutory cause and instead told them their service was inconsistent with his administration’s priorities, according to the same Supreme Court summary¹.

The old rule came from Humphrey’s Executor, where the Court described the FTC as an independent, nonpartisan body of experts performing predominantly quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, not simply a presidential enforcement arm, according to the 1935 decision². That old language has always been a bit too clean. Modern independent agencies do enforce laws. They investigate, settle cases, issue rules and sometimes adjudicate disputes in-house. The new Court leaned hard on that reality, saying the FTC administers about 80 statutes, can issue substantive rules, investigate businesses, conduct in-house adjudications and bring civil suits for the United States, so it exercises executive power and must be controlled by the chief executive, according to Trump v. Slaughter¹.

That is the strongest case for the ruling. If an agency can impose penalties and bind private parties, voters should know whom to blame. Elena Kagan’s famous article on “Presidential Administration”⁵ made the best liberal version of that point long before this Court adopted the unitary-executive frame: presidential control can make bureaucracy more transparent, responsive and energetic. The Court’s accountability chain is simple: executive officers answer to the president, and the president answers to voters.

I take that seriously. I also think it misses the practical job Congress assigned to these agencies. Cabinet departments are expected to carry out presidential policy. Independent regulatory commissions were designed differently: multimember boards, staggered terms, bipartisan limits and removal protections were meant to slow sudden political takeover and make some decisions look less like commands from the current occupant of the Oval Office. The Congressional Research Service has described independence as a bundle of structural features, including leadership tenure, presidential oversight, congressional funding and rulemaking authority, that can shield agencies from presidential direction and partisan influence, especially in financial regulation, according to CRS³.

The difference is not politics versus no politics. Politics was already there. A study by Amy Semet of NLRB unfair-labor-practice decisions found that the board’s partisan ideology and administrative law judge decisions had the most impact, while Congress, the president and appellate courts did not have a direct effect on outcomes, according to the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law article⁴. That evidence cuts against the fairy tale of neutral technocracy. But it also supports the real value of insulation: politics came mainly through appointments and board composition, not through a live threat of immediate presidential dismissal.

That distinction is the whole ballgame. Appointment politics is front-end politics. The president picks nominees, the Senate confirms them, terms expire, elections eventually matter. Removal politics is back-end discipline. It lets the president tell a sitting commissioner, in effect, vote the wrong way and lose your job. Courts can review final agency actions for legal defects, but they usually cannot see the cases never opened, the settlements softened, the dissents never written or the investigations quietly delayed.

We are already seeing the language of independence change. Two days after Slaughter, the FTC released a proposed AI policy statement warning that AI companies may deceive consumers if they steer outputs in ways consumers do not expect, including in response to state laws such as Colorado’s AI law, according to the FTC proposal⁶. The proposal also frames the agency’s work in unmistakably presidential terms, saying that “under the President’s leadership” the Trump-Vance administration had taken steps to sustain American AI dominance and that a Trump executive order directed the Commission to issue the policy statement, according to the same FTC document⁶. That does not prove the policy is wrong. It does show what a formerly independent economic regulator sounds like when the White House is no longer across the street but in the chain of command.

The effect will not stop at the FTC. A Covington analysis of the Consumer Product Safety Commission argued that Slaughter gives new support to treating similar CPSC protections as unenforceable and advised stakeholders to watch not only the Commission but also the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department to forecast CPSC rulemaking and enforcement priorities, according to Covington⁷. The same analysis noted that Trump fired three Democratic CPSC members in May 2025 before their terms expired and that, after those removals, a proposed lithium-ion battery safety rule for e-bikes and e-scooters was pulled from public comment and sent to White House regulatory review, according to Covington⁷.

That is how markets adjust. Firms will still hire lawyers to read statutes and rules. But when the referee can be replaced for displeasing the president, regulated companies will spend more time reading White House signals, cultivating presidential allies and timing cases around elections. In finance, labor, communications, consumer protection and elections, that is not just a lobbying shift. It changes the credibility of the law itself. A rule that looks like a presidential preference is easier for opponents to dismiss as partisan and easier for regulated parties to treat as temporary.

The Court knows this problem exists because it carved out the Federal Reserve. In Trump v. Cook⁸, decided the same day, the Court left in place an injunction preventing Trump from removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook while litigation continued, and Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that the Court had confirmed the longstanding historical understanding that Federal Reserve governors enjoy for-cause removal protection. The Court’s stated reason was the Fed’s distinct historical tradition of independent central banking, according to Trump v. Cook⁸.

That exception is revealing. The Court preserved central-bank independence because markets need to believe interest-rate decisions are not just White House instructions. I agree the Fed is special. But the same logic applies, in smaller and more domain-specific ways, to the SEC policing securities markets, the FCC licensing broadcasters, the NLRB adjudicating labor disputes and the FTC deciding which competition cases to bring. Independence is not sacred because experts are pure. It is useful because some government functions work better when parties believe the decision-maker cannot be fired for annoying the president.

The accountability argument will win some real points in the short run. A president will now own more agency action. Congress may have to legislate more clearly instead of handing broad discretion to commissions and then complaining about what they do with it. Those are not trivial gains. But the price is higher than the Court admits: less internal dissent, more policy whiplash after elections, more presidential lobbying by regulated firms and weaker public confidence in agencies that were built to look like referees rather than campaign staff.

The measure of Slaughter will not be whether every agency action suddenly becomes unlawful. The measure will be quieter: whether commissioners stop dissenting, whether enforcement agendas flip more violently, whether politically awkward investigations disappear, whether companies start treating the White House as the real docket clerk. If those things happen, the ruling will have done exactly what its logic invites. It will not have destroyed the administrative state. It will have made it more obedient, and that is a different kind of damage.