Statement Regarding Trump v. Slaughter Decision

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 29, 2026 — The Committee for Justice (CFJ) today welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, holding that the for-cause restriction on removing Federal Trade Commissioners violates the separation of powers and overruling Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. 

The following is the statement of Ashley Baker, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice:

“Today the Court corrected one of the longest-standing errors in its separation-of-powers jurisprudence. The Constitution vests the executive power in a single President and charges him to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The Framers made that choice deliberately. Having thrown off a distant sovereign, they rejected a plural executive in favor of one official in whom responsibility could be fixed and, as Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70, on whom the blame for a pernicious measure ought to fall. The power to remove subordinate officers is the necessary corollary of that design: a President cannot answer for an administration he cannot control.

This is not a novel theory but the original and settled understanding. The First Congress resolved the question in the Decision of 1789, recognizing removal as part of the executive power that the legislature may not diminish. Madison explained that only through that power could the ‘chain of dependence’ be preserved — so that the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest depend on the President, and the President on the people. The Court confirmed as much a century ago in Myers v. United States. Today’s decision restores that line of authority. It does not invent it.

Humphrey's Executor was, in the Court's own words, a result in search of a rationale. It rested on the fiction that the FTC exercised no executive power — a fiction that was strained in 1935 and untenable today. The modern Commission promulgates rules carrying the force of law, prosecutes Americans through in-house adjudications, and sues on behalf of the United States under more than eighty statutes. That is the execution of law, and those who wield it must be accountable to the elected Chief Executive. CFJ has long maintained that Humphrey's was wrongly decided. The Court has now said so plainly. 

This is a disciplined decision, not the sweeping one its critics forecast. What the ruling delivers is not institutional chaos but accountability — the principle that makes self-government coherent. A Federal Trade Commission answerable to the President is not a weaker guardian of competition and consumers; it is a more legitimate and more disciplined one." 

The Committee for Justice has participated in the decades-long effort to restore constitutional limits on the independent-agency structure and to reaffirm that those who exercise executive power remain answerable to the President and, through him, to the people. The decision in Slaughter vindicates that effort.

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Media Contact: Ashley Baker, abaker@committeeforjustice.org; (704) 214-0542