Trump v. Slaughter and the Future of For-Cause Removal Protections (July 2, 2026)

Summary

Congressional Research Service Legal Sidebar LSB11448, dated July 2, 2026, on Trump v. Slaughter and for-cause removal protections. It says that in a 6-3 decision on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided that statutory provisions allowing the President to remove Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners only "for cause" violate the Constitution, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts that explicitly overrules Humphrey's Executor v. United States. It states that in Trump v. Cook, released the same day, the Court upheld for-cause removal protections for Federal Reserve Board governors. The sidebar also summarizes the dissent of Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Legal Sidebari



Trump v. Slaughter and the Future of For-
Cause Removal Protections

July 2, 2026
In a 6-3 decision on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held that statutory provisions that allow the
President to remove Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners only “for cause” violate the
Constitution. The Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito,
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, explicitly overrules the 1935 Supreme Court case Humphrey’s
Executor v. United States, which had upheld Congress’s use of statutory provisions limiting the
President’s removal of members of the FTC. Courts initially applied Humphrey's broadly to uphold for-
cause removal protections for multimember boards intended to operate with some independence from
presidential control and with functions that were characterized as “quasi-legislative” or quasi-judicial.”
More recent cases, however, narrowed Humphrey's application and questioned, in nonbinding dicta,
whether the case “withstood the test of time.” In Slaughter, the majority declared that “If anything more is
left of Humphrey’s,” it is “overruled.”
The Court’s decision in Slaughter renders the provisions limiting the removal of FTC commissioners,
including Rebecca Slaughter, no longer applicable. The long-term impact of the Court’s decision is
difficult to predict, however. The Court only addressed the President’s removal authority over FTC
commissioners, but dozens of agencies headed by multimember boards or commissions (commonly
referred to as independent regulatory commissions)—like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Federal Reserve—have similar, if not identical,
statutory removal provisions. After Slaughter, however, those provisions appear to be on precarious legal
footing. (In Trump v. Cook, a separate case released the same day as Slaughter, the Court upheld the for-
cause removal protections for Federal Reserve Board governors.) The Court also left open whether the
President has the power to directly remove officials appointed by agency leaders—known as “inferior
officers.”


Procedural Background in Slaughter
Since the beginning of his second term, President Trump has dismissed dozens of officials from
independent regulatory commissions who are covered by statutory for-cause removal provisions. The
removal provisions at issue limited the President’s ability to remove board members and commissioners
of multimember commission-style agencies. These provisions require some form of cause for the
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    LSB11448

CRS Legal Sidebar
Prepared for Members and
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Congressional Research Service                                                                               2




President to remove a commissioner or board member, usually but not always formulated as “inefficiency,
neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Notwithstanding these provisions, President Trump’s removals
were largely carried out pursuant to the Administration’s legal conclusion that existing statutory
restrictions on removal are an unconstitutional restraint on the President’s constitutional authority over the
executive branch. Leaders of independent commissions, the Administration argued, serve at the pleasure
of the President and may, like other agency officials, be removed at will.
Members of at least eight independent agencies filed lawsuits in federal court challenging their removal,
including Gwynne Wilcox and Rebecca Slaughter, whom the President removed from the NLRB and
FTC, respectively. A federal district court first issued a decision reinstating Wilcox, holding that the
President’s action violated the applicable statutory removal limitation and that, under Humphrey’s, the
limitation did not unconstitutionally infringe on the President’s removal power. The government sought a
stay of the district court opinion in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (D.C. Circuit), which,
sitting en banc, held that “[t]he Supreme Court’s repeated and recent statements that Humphrey’s
Executor . . . remain[s] precedential” required denial of the motion. The government petitioned the
Supreme Court for a stay pending appeal, which that Court ultimately granted. In doing so, the Court
appeared to signal that the holding in Humphrey’s may no longer support the use of tenure protections for
modern independent regulatory commissions, at least not those like the NLRB that can be said to exercise
executive power. “The stay,” the Court stated, “reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to
show that . . . the NLRB exercise[s] considerable executive power.”
Shortly thereafter, a federal district court ordered the reinstatement of Ms. Slaughter to the FTC. As in
Trump v. Wilcox, the government sought a stay of that ruling from the D.C. Circuit, which again denied
the stay on the grounds that the issue was foreclosed by Humphrey’s. According to the D.C. Circuit, the
government had “no likelihood of success . . . given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court
precedent.” As the court explained, a “unanimous Supreme Court” had upheld Congress’s use of for-cause
provisions to limit the President’s ability to remove FTC commissioners “ninety years ago,” and “[o]ver
the ensuing decades—and fully informed of the substantial executive power exercised by the
Commission—the Supreme Court has repeatedly and expressly left Humphrey’s Executor in place, and so
precluded Presidents from removing Commissioners at will.” Though the Supreme Court may have
suggested that Humphrey’s did not apply to the NLRB in Wilcox, the D.C. Circuit determined that the case
continued to apply to the FTC (William Humphrey was an FTC commissioner). The government again
sought a stay from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court granted that stay and, treating the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari
before judgment, granted the petition, directing the parties to brief and argue “[w]hether the statutory
removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers and,
if so, whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, should be overruled.”


The Slaughter Decision
The Court’s decision overrules Humphrey’s, thereby invalidating removal provisions for FTC
commissioners and, likely, officials appointed to commission-style agencies that wield executive power,
including the authority to bring a case in federal court, issue binding regulations, and adjudicate claims.
The Court grounded this decision in its view of the text, structure, and history of Article II of the
Constitution. In the Court’s view, the Vesting Clause of Article II, which vests “the executive power” in “a
President of the United States,” creates a “unity” of executive power in a single person—the President.
From this premise, the Court derived its holding that all power delegated to the executive branch is the
President’s and, as “a necessary corollary,” any executive power wielded by an officer must be
answerable to the President through the power to remove them at will.
Congressional Research Service                                                                             3




This reading of the Constitution, the Court contended, is supported by early American history. The
delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the Court recounted, debated the structure of
the executive branch at length, ultimately deciding on a single President that would exercise “energy
[and] vigour” and a certain amount of control over any officers provided by Congress. While neither the
Constitution nor the delegates in Philadelphia mentioned the removal power, the Court held that the basic
structure of Article II mandates at-will removal for subordinate officials. The inability to remove
subordinate officials at will would, in the Court’s view, destroy the unity the Framers created in vesting a
single President with the executive power. More fundamentally, the Court explained that removal “was
just part of what it meant to wield ‘the executive power.’” According to the Slaughter majority, the First
Congress confirmed this reading in its debate and creation of the first three executive departments in
1789. The Court reasoned that, by identifying the fate of documents held by a subordinate if he were
removed by the President, the First Congress recognized that the Constitution vests the removal power
with the President and the President alone. The Court also surveyed judicial decisions, commentary, and
presidential and congressional practice throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, which it described as
confirming the President’s power to remove subordinates at will.
With this historical analysis, the Court cast Slaughter as the final step in a long line of 20th- and 21st-
century cases that slowly and persistently chipped away at the foundations of the Humphrey’s decision.
(Several CRS products address in detail the history of the Supreme Court’s shifting approach to
Humphrey’s.) In Humphrey’s, decided in 1935, the Supreme Court held that Congress could limit the
President’s authority to remove members of commission-style agencies that were “predominantly quasi-
judicial and quasi-legislative” in nature. Humphrey’s came just nine years after the Court’s apparently
contrary decision in Myers v. United States. There, the Court invalidated a statutory provision that
prohibited the President from removing an appointed executive official—a postmaster—without first
obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate. Myers recognized that “the executive power” vested in the
President by Article II includes “the power of appointment and removal of executive officers,” along with
“general administrative control” of the executive branch. Myers did not address the constitutionality of
statutory removal protections, even though its sweeping pronouncements about executive authority
indicate that such provisions might be constitutionally suspect. Humphrey’s, however, did address
removal protections for commissioners of the FTC. It distinguished Myers by holding that the FTC did
not exercise “executive” power but rather exercised “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” power. As a
result, the Humphrey’s Court ruled that commissioners need not be removable at will by the President.
Beginning in the 1980s, however, the Court began to cast doubt on the Humphrey’s decision. In the 1988
case Morrison v. Olson, the Court in dicta explained that it thought the FTC “would at the present time be
considered ‘executive,’ at least to some degree,” undermining Humphrey’s categorization of the FTC as
quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial. In a series of cases from 2010 to 2024, the Court displayed a growing
skepticism of Congress’s authority to limit removal of executive officials heading departments, describing
the President’s power as “unrestricted” and “exclusive.” As part of this transition, the modern Court had
stated, up until its decision in Slaughter, that it recognized “only two” specific scenarios in which
Congress could insulate a federal officer from at-will removal to encourage agency independence: “one
for multimember expert agencies that do not wield substantial executive power” that derives from the
Court’s holding in Humphrey’s, “and one for inferior officers with limited duties and no policymaking or
administrative authority” that derives primarily from Morrison. The Court’s two most recent cases prior
to Slaughter deciding the scope of presidential removal power formally left Humphrey’s in place but
undercut the rationale for that decision by stating that Humphrey’s “conclusion that the FTC did not
exercise executive power has not withstood the test of time.” In ruling that the for-cause removal
protections for FTC commissioners impermissibly encroached upon the President’s removal authority, the
Court in Slaughter reasoned that it was simply taking its decisions over the last several decades to their
logical conclusion. In the Court’s words: “To persist in Humphrey’s would require us to depart from
almost every case on the subject we have decided since.”
Congressional Research Service                                                                               4




The FTC, the Court held, exercises significant executive authority. It promulgates binding regulations,
enforces statutes and its own regulations through in-house adjudications, and can bring suit on behalf of
the United States in federal court. The Court noted that it held each of these powers to be “executive” in
nature in prior cases and determined that “The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must
therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive.” Because the FTC’s functions “fall well within the
heartland of executive power,” the Court declined to use the case as an opportunity “to define the bounds
of what such power entails.”
The Court also explicitly disclaimed that it was deciding the permissibility of statutory removal protection
for other officials. In particular, the Court identified the Federal Reserve as outside the ambit of its
decision, although on the same day Slaughter was issued, the Court issued its decision in Trump v. Cook,
upholding the constitutionality of removal protections for Federal Reserve Board of Governors members
because of the Federal Reserve’s “distinct historical tradition.” The Court also left “for another day” the
fate of removal protections for non-Article III courts, like the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims.
Finally, the Court did not explicitly address the President’s authority to remove “inferior officers.”
Inferior officers are those officers within the executive branch who wield a limited amount of executive
authority but are subject to supervision by a superior officer who themselves report directly to the
President—a head of an executive agency or department, for example. The Appointments Clause of the
Constitution permits Congress to vest the appointment of inferior officers in the President, a head of
department, or a court of law, all without the need for Senate advice and consent. Several Supreme Court
decisions spanning over a century have announced two principles that Slaughter may have called into
question. First, beginning in the early 19th century, the Court recognized the common law principle that,
unless otherwise specified by statute, the power to appoint an official carries with it the power to remove
that official. Second, where the power to appoint was vested with a head of department, as is permitted
for inferior officers, the Court held (on two occasions separated by almost a century) that Congress may
impose restrictions on the removal of certain kinds of inferior officers. The Court’s pronouncements in
Slaughter of the President’s removal authority over the executive branch, however, appear to raise the
question of whether the President could directly remove an inferior officer whose appointment was vested
with a head of department or court of law and whether Congress could impose any removal procedures or
limitations in such cases. (The reach of Slaughter may also have implications for administrative law
judges who adjudicate claims brought before agencies as well as for civil service tenure protections,
which were based largely on the Court’s 19th century opinions.)


The Dissent
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. The dissent first contended that the
Court’s decision unsettles over a century of law and practice dating back to the creation of the first
modern independent agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission—in 1887. The dissent also took aim
at the majority’s historical analysis, noting the absence of any constitutional provision addressing removal
specifically and any debate during the Constitutional Convention on the topic. In the dissent’s view, the
majority’s account of the Framers’ writings before and after ratification of the Constitution and the views
of 19th-century judges and commentators elides inconvenient statements that indicate a much larger and
more nuanced range of views regarding presidential removal. The unsettled nature of the debate over
decades (if not centuries) should, the dissent argued, give the majority pause in holding that the
Constitution is clear in empowering the President to remove subordinates at will.
The dissent faulted the majority for leaving unanswered many questions about the scope of its opinion.
What is it, the dissent asked rhetorically, that would make non-Article III courts not subject to the logic of
the majority’s opinion, since the majority held that adjudications by entities within the executive branch
are an exercise of executive power subject to the control of the President? What is the fate of inferior
Congressional Research Service                                                                               5




officers and civil servants who exercise some amount of executive power given the Court’s holding? The
dissent predicted that these open questions will generate “chaos” for lower courts and agencies trying to
implement the Court’s decision. Finally, the dissent criticized the majority for carving out the Federal
Reserve from its decision. Why, the dissent asked, should only agencies that influence monetary policy be
exempt from the constitutional limits on Congress’s authority? Moreover, the dissent argued that the
majority does not explain how similar the Federal Reserve must remain to its historical antecedents to
continue to qualify for this exemption. These are all issues that, in the dissent’s view, were already settled
law under Humphrey’s that the Court will now have to address over time.


Considerations for Congress
The Court’s decision imposes a clear limit on Congress’s legislative powers: it likely no longer can
provide for-cause removal protections for members of commission-style agencies who wield executive
power. The Court declined to provide a comprehensive definition of executive power, but it declared that
“When an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive
power.” In the Court’s view, issuing regulations concerning private party conduct, conducting in-house
adjudication, and bringing suit in federal court in the name of the United States are all exercises of
executive power that require presidential control through at-will removal.
The practical upshot of this opinion appears to be that the members of dozens of commission-style
agencies likely now serve at the pleasure of the President, providing the President with a powerful tool to
impose policy priorities. Justice Gorsuch, in his concurring opinion, and the dissent suggested that
Congress might never have delegated such broad authorities to executive branch agencies without
independence from the President provided by removal protections. Justice Gorsuch noted, however, that if
Congress wishes to diminish the power of these agencies, it may have to do so through a veto-proof
supermajority, since, in his estimation, a President would likely veto a dissipation of his regulatory power.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the Court’s decision appears to leave Congress with several possible
legislative options, should it wish to respond. Significantly, Congress is the primary architect of executive
branch agencies. If Congress were to decide that Slaughter unsettles the fundamental bargain of
independent agencies (i.e., the delegation of great power conditioned on independence from the
President), it could claw back some or all of the power it delegated to these agencies. Congress could also
disestablish these agencies, reorganize them as it sees fit, or break them apart and distribute their powers
among other agencies. In addition, for principal officers, the Constitution vests the Senate with the power
of advice and consent over the President’s nominees, and Congress may elect to use the same
appointments framework for inferior officers. Requiring Senate assent to a nominee could influence the
President’s selection of persons for those offices. Moreover, the Senate may be able to limit an agency’s
ability to act by withholding its advice and consent of a nominee.
Other potential options include designing additional procedures to limit presidential influence. To date,
the Supreme Court has never questioned the legitimacy of generally applicable procedural rules
prescribed by Congress for how agencies carry out their delegated functions. Statutes like the
Administrative Procedure Act or the Paperwork Reduction Act create such procedures for rulemaking,
agency adjudications, and information collection efforts. The nature of commission-style agencies may
create additional opportunities for Congress to impose requirements before an agency can act. Because
commission-style agencies necessarily have more than one person at the top of the agency, Congress
could, for example, require a certain number of members to be present before an agency takes action.
Known as a quorum requirement, this type of provision can bar an agency from acting with too few
members present and would appear to give the Senate some degree of control over such agencies’ ability
to act by withholding advice and consent of presidential nominees, thereby defeating a quorum. Some
commission-style agencies already have statutory quorum requirements—the National Transportation
Congressional Research Service                                                                                    6




Safety Board is an example—but many do not. Congress could also impose supermajority voting
requirements on agency action. Given that most commission-style agencies are also balanced along
partisan lines, with the President’s party receiving a bare majority of seats, a supermajority voting
requirement would require consent from a member in the minority before the agency could take action.
These kinds of procedural interventions may limit the ability of a President or a single party to exercise
complete control over an agency but might come with significant costs in the agency’s ability act quickly,
or at all.
Ultimately, although Slaughter overruled Humphrey’s and invalidated the statutory removal protections
for FTC commissioners, it left open a number of questions that the courts will likely address, as well as
options for Congress to provide direction to the President and the courts in future cases.


Author Information

Benjamin M. Barczewski                                     Jonathan M. Gaffney
Legislative Attorney                                       Supervisory Attorney

Todd Garvey
Legislative Attorney




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