Supreme Court Splits on Presidential Power: Trump Wins FTC Case, Fed Governor Cook Survives
The Supreme Court delivered a split verdict on presidential authority Tuesday, handing President Donald Trump a landmark expansion of his power to remove officials at independent federal agencies while simultaneously blocking his bid to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook — a decision that leaves the central bank as a rare exception to the new executive reach.
In a 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court overturned the 90-year-old precedent of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, holding that presidents may dismiss members of independent agencies at will so long as those members exercise “purely executive” functions. The decision greenlit Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat appointed under Biden, and explicitly rejected the notion that Congress can shield multimember boards from presidential control.
A President ‘Must Have Officers He Can Trust’
Roberts framed the ruling as a restoration of constitutional first principles, writing that a president “must have the assistance of officers he can trust” in order to fulfill Article II duties. The majority drew a sharp distinction between multimember bodies created primarily to exercise quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers — which retain limited protection — and those whose core functions are executive in nature.
The ruling is expected to ripple across more than a dozen federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board, all of which have historically operated with significant independence from direct White House control.
Trump celebrated the decision on social media, calling it “one of the most important rulings in American history” and crediting himself with restoring presidential authority that he argued previous administrations had ceded. The White House signaled it would move swiftly to install new leadership at agencies where tenure protections had previously blocked removal.
Cook Survives, but Fed Independence Remains Under Scrutiny
In a companion case decided the same day, the Court’s majority ruled that the Trump administration had “not shown that it is likely to prevail” in defending Cook’s dismissal, sending the matter back to a lower court for further proceedings. Roberts, writing for the majority, emphasized that Congress explicitly designed the Fed’s board with staggered 14-year terms and statutory removal protections specifically to insulate monetary policy from political pressure.
The decision underscores a constitutional tradition, Roberts noted, of shielding central banking from the executive branch — a principle stretching back to the Fed’s founding in 1913 and reinforced by decades of bipartisan practice. Cook, who was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed in 2022, has maintained that her firing was unlawful and pledged to continue serving.
Trump had alleged that Cook made material misrepresentations about mortgage rates tied to two properties she purchased. Cook has rejected those claims, arguing that the firing was politically motivated and designed to compromise the Fed’s independence ahead of monetary policy decisions.
The dual rulings create what legal scholars described as a bifurcated landscape: a president newly empowered to reshape the executive branch at most agencies, but constrained at the one institution most consequential to the economy. Legal analysts said the contradiction is unlikely to persist, and that future litigation may eventually bring the Fed within the scope of the Court’s expanded presidential removal authority.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent in the Humphrey’s Executor case, warned that the majority had rewritten “the settled expectations of a century” and handed the executive branch unchecked power over independent regulatory structures that Congress designed to check exactly that kind of authority. The decision, Sotomayor wrote, dismantles the structural protections that have maintained a separation between politics and governance for generations.
Congressional Democrats vowed to respond with legislation codifying removal protections for commissioners at affected agencies. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the ruling “a dangerous overreach” that would “politicize every independent agency overnight” and urged Senate Majority Leader to bring a response bill to the floor within weeks. It remained unclear whether any GOP senators would break with the White House to support such a measure.
