WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a pair of significant rulings from the highest judicial body in the nation, the Commander-in-Chief’s “firing” in August 2025 of a member of the Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors was rejected, with the Supreme Court of the United States rejecting the government’s “halfhearted contention” that Lisa Cook “in fact received due process.”
At the same time, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded a case involving former Federal Trade Commission Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, the latter of whom sued the president.
The case filed by Slaughter, a 6-3 decision that saw Justice Clarence Thomas concur with the opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts on all but one part of the ruling, could have an impact on FCC Democratic Commissioner Anna M. Gómez.
Gómez has emerged as a vociferous, fiery critic of the Carr Commission and actions she believes are being orchestrated to a grand extent by President Trump. Her term ends Tuesday (6/30).
What happens come Wednesday is not entirely certain. Traditionally, Commissioners enter a period where they can keep their seat at a government agency until a successor is confirmed. With no nominee selected by the Trump Administration, Gomez is expected to stay in place. However, anything’s possible given the tenor of Washington politics over the last 18 months — even if it reduces the Commission to a two-vote body without a quorum call on pending matters of high importance to the telecommunications and broadcast media industry.
If anything, Gómez is guaranteed a place at the Commission until early January 2027, when the current Congressional session concludes.
That said, the ruling in Trump, et. al. v. Slaughter — argued on December 8, 2025 and decided on the final day of the current Supreme Court term — could bring a chilling effect to agency Commissioners who express high disagreement with the executive branch of the U.S. government in the future. The likelihood of Gomez’s immediate departure, lest she resign, is low.
Francisco Montero, co-Managing Partner at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, believes that while this decision expands the President’s power to remove independent agency commissioners, President Trump has a separate dilemma when it comes to Anna Gomez and the current FCC in that there are only three commissioners currently serving. “This Chairman needs all three to have a quorum, so if President Trump decided to remove or not reappoint Commissioner Gomez reducing the commissioners to two, Chairman Carr’s agenda could grind to a halt until a third commissioner could be appointed and confirmed to reinstitute that quorum,” Montero says. And, President Trump “would have to appoint a Democrat to Commissioner Gomez’s seat” or, in a move that is technically permissible but has never been done, a politically independent nominee could be selected.
In the Slaughter ruling, the majority confirmed that the FTC is a regulatory agency whose powers belong not to the president or his appointees alone, but instead to five Commissioners — each of whom serves for seven years. They may be removed by the president only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Enter Bedoya and Slaughter, Democratic appointees who were fired by President Trump shortly after he began his second non-consecutive term in office. Rather than identifying a cause under the statute, the Commander-in-Chief instead told them their “continued service on the FTC [was] inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities” and that they were removed “pursuant to [his] authority under Article II of the Constitution.”
Slaughter sued, arguing that her removal was ultra vires, violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and violated the Constitution. A District Court handed Slaughter a victory, ruling that the case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States carved out an exception for the FTC. A divided Court of Appeals denied the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal, and the Supreme Court subsequently stayed the District Court’s order and granted certiorari before judgement.
How did the majority move forward? it upheld the president’s ability to remove a Commissioner, based on “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” by stating, “To remain accountable to the President, those officers must be removable by the President.” Further, the majority said “the power to remove at will was a necessary corollary of the Constitution’s design.” In fact, it was founding father James Madison whose contention that removal was part of the “Executive power” vested in the president that led Chief Justice Roberts and the majority to make its ruling against Slaughter.
Importantly, the Supreme Court has invalidated Humphrey’s Executor as a standard for legal conclusion, saying it has “not withstood the test of time” and that, “from the start, Humphrey’s was tethered to a highly circumscribed view of the FTC’s role. Humphrey’s by its terms applied only to agencies that occupy “no place in the executive department,” are “independent of executive authority,” and exercise “no part of the executive power.”
Later cases, Roberts’ majority opinion states, saw the Supreme Court conclude that more functions fell on the executive side of the line — and thus within the president’s control. Thus, the Supreme Court all but provided a legal history lesson to the District Court, pointing to a 1988 ruling demonstrating how Humphrey’s “flunked even its own test” decades after it was used against President Roosevelt in 1933.
Sonia Sotomayor disagrees, as do Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Writing the dissenting opinion, she turned to Humphrey’s and how since 1935 “Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable Government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition.”
Sotomayor continued, “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong. The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President. In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws. If nothing else, the doctrine of stare decisis, which today’s decision cursorily dismisses, should have made this a profoundly easy case under Humphrey’s.”
With Roberts writing for the majority that “the FTC unquestionably exercises executive power and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive,” he adds, “Not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive power, and the Court has left open the possibility that some functions traditionally handled outside the Executive Branch may not be encompassed by [Myers v. United States, a landmark ruling confirming the president’s ability to fire his subordinates at will] and its general rule. One example the Court has given of such an entity is the Federal Reserve, to the extent that it follows in the tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
This fueled the decision in Trump v. Cook, with the Court ruling, “Acceptance of the Government’s position would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”
Interestingly, Chief Justice Roberts was joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh, with Clarence Thomas penning a dissenting opinion as did Justices Samuel Alito, who was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch; and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Read the majority and dissenting opinions in Trump v. Slaughter by clicking here.
