The word “Justice” is seen on the rear side of the Supreme Court Building as the Court hears arguments on December 8, 2025 in the case arising from President Donald Trump’s dismissal of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. The case is being closely watched due to its broader implications concerning the president’s powers to fire the heads of independent government agencies. (Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
THE SUPREME COURT heard oral argument on Monday in a case where what’s at stake is nothing less than the wholesale reshaping of the federal government through another massive transfer of largely unaccountable power to a single man uniquely and dangerously unqualified to wield it. And based on the direction of the justices’ questions, the Court seems likely to do just that.
Trump v. Slaughter involves the constitutionality of “for cause” restrictions on presidents’ power to remove principal officers. Under Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Once the Constitution took effect in 1789, Congress began creating by statute the federal agencies (starting with what would become the State Department). In many of the statutes creating these federal bodies, Congress included qualification criteria for hiring certain officers and employees.
Although Article II specifically gives presidents the power to appoint officers, Congress’s ability to put restraints on hiring makes sense under the Necessary and Proper Clause which, again, allows it to pass laws regarding “all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government,” including those involving the president. The Trump-leaning Supreme Court justices pretty much shrugged off this language at oral argument, instead seeming to embrace the “unitary executive theory,” a robust conception of presidential power that essentially holds that any and every person who works within the multi-million-member executive branch workforce is merely an appendage of the president and his exclusive power. Like a king, he can therefore direct them to do whatever he wants and fire them any time they don’t make him happy. This theory holds that once Congress creates agencies, it cannot control them—only the president can.
Which is why this case is such a huge deal. If Trump gets his way, which after Monday’s oral argument seems virtually certain, the logical next step is that Solicitor General John Sauer and his team will be running around arguing that all civil service laws are unconstitutional. Even decisions by administrative judges, many of whom work within executive branch agencies on matters like immigration, could become susceptible to the political whims of Donald Trump.
Unlike appointment, Article II says nothing about the removal of executive branch officers. The Court in 1926 held that the removal power is an implied reciprocal of the appointment power, and hence belongs to the president, and in 1935 held that this implied authority doesn’t mean Congress can’t place reasonable limits on that implied power. In most instances where the issue has come up at all in the last ninety years, Congress has required that the president give good reasons (or “cause”) for firing certain people, including members of the Federal Trade Commission.
In 2020, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion clipping Congress’s authority to limit the president’s ability to fire heads of single-headed agencies to things like inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance, but left untouched so-called “independent” agencies, like the FTC, which operate pursuant to panels or commissions with one member being the chief. Congress’s justification for this structure, under which over two dozen agencies currently operate, is that the public does better if some roles in the federal government are filled by people who aren’t political loyalists and ideologues.
Trump ignored all of this precedent when on March 18 he fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without good cause. He also ignored similar congressional directives when he fired the heads of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The Court’s right-wing majority stayed the lower court rulings enjoining all of these firings under settled law on its emergency docket, ignoring its own precedent. The only person whose firing did give the Court pause is Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board whose favorable ruling it did not disturb, although it’s hearing her case later this term. In its shadow docket ruling allowing the other two firings, the Court made a clumsy and unpersuasive argument that the Federal Reserve Board is somehow special. That argument makes no logical sense, as the oral argument made clear today. If the president’s Article II removal power cannot be restrained, then it cannot be restrained even for people whom the majority might want to protect from political influence, like the Federal Reserve Board.
Gallingly, Sauer’s repeated justification for what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “restructuring the entire government” was “individual liberty.” That’s right. While his boss celebrates the shooting of U.S. boat-bombing survivors in international waters, the rounding up en masse, often violently, of people for having brown skin and speaking Spanish, and the removal of some migrants, including possible U.S. citizens, to third-country prisons without due process where they could be tortured and killed, Sauer bemoaned how Slaughter’s limited statutory protections from being fired by the president from the FTC are an affront to individual liberty and cannot be tolerated.
THE REAL KICKER is that this case is not just about executive power, meaning the power to execute the federal laws like a local police officer or prosecutor does. In creating the federal agencies, Congress gave many of them the power to enact regulations, which function like laws. Sauer argued that all regulatory or lawmaking power, once given, belongs to the president, too. But for nearly a century, Congress has legislated against the backdrop of Supreme Court precedent allowing it to put restrictions on the president’s removal power. It had no idea that, in 2025, a different Court might play “gotcha” and essentially tell Congress that all of that legislative power (and judicial power, because remember that many agencies have their own administrative judges) is now Donald Trump’s to keep, unless it can muster a veto-proof majority to change the law to strip him of it. Good luck with that.
As usual, Justices Elena Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson tried valiantly to lay out the stakes, pressing Sauer to at least grapple with them—which he did not. Meanwhile, the counsel for Slaughter was disturbingly outmatched. If anything, he helped Trump, citing Trump v. U.S., the case giving the president criminal immunity, in conceding that the president does have absolute power to remove certain officials but failing to come up with some sort of limiting principle or dividing line. The pro-Trump justices had a heyday with this, concocting all sorts of hypotheticals that Congress would never do but which now give them cover to say they were just protecting the American public from encroachments on liberty by the big bad FTC.
Depending on how the majority writes the opinion (its author will likely be Roberts, who has penned the bulk of the Court’s pro-Trump opinions on presidential power, including Trump v. U.S.), Slaughter will mark a terrible new milestone for our system of separated powers, and another major step toward making the president a king. As Sauer said on Monday, “the one with the power to remove is the one that they have to fear and obey.”
