US Governance — 2026-06-29

Supreme Court Overturns 90-Year-Old Humphreys Executor Precedent Expanding Presidential Power to Fire Independent Agency Heads With Federal Reserve Exception

BLUFStructural independence for federal regulatory commissions is now functionally extinct, converting agencies designed as congressional instruments into extensions of presidential policy discretion.

The Supreme Court ruled six to three Monday that the president may fire independent agency heads at will, with Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion explicitly overruling Humphrey's Executor: "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it" 1234. The case arose from Trump's March 2025 termination of FTC Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya without stated cause; Bedoya resigned in June 2025 and dropped his suit, leaving Slaughter as the named party before the Court 2. Roberts carved out the Federal Reserve, writing the opinion "should not be read" as affecting the central bank's structure, and a companion five-to-four ruling the same day blocked Trump from immediately removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook pending district court litigation 12. Justice Sotomayor dissented, writing that the majority "gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown" and that the ruling "undoes centuries of political practice" 2.

Analysis
The ruling converts every Senate-confirmed independent agency commissioner into an at-will executive employee, collapsing the structural firewall Congress built into the FTC, SEC, NLRB, CFPB, and FCC. Regulatory dissent now carries personal job risk, and minority-commissioner transparency mechanisms are neutralized. With the Cook litigation still in district court, the Federal Reserve carve-out's boundaries remain unresolved. Roberts's framing that the FTC "unquestionably exercises executive power" signals lower courts to read the exception narrowly, leaving most multi-member commissions exposed. A broader judicial reading could shelter monetary and quasi-governmental bodies well beyond the central bank, constraining the ruling's practical scope.

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