The Supreme Court has handed presidents broader power to remove the heads of independent federal agencies, a 6-3 ruling that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. In the decision known as Trump v. Slaughter, the court said the Constitution grants the president broad power to remove the heads of “independent” federal agencies.
That matters now because Donald Trump already moved last year to test the edges of that authority, firing members of several independent agencies and leaving them without a quorum. Months later, the fallout was concrete: the National Labor Relations Board could no longer adjudicate certain union disputes, and the Merit Systems Protection Board could not issue final decisions in the example cited by the court.
The ruling tightens presidential control over agencies that were built to operate at a remove from the White House. Removal protection was one of the design features meant to give these commissions stability and a bipartisan balance. Most are multimember bodies with staggered, time-limited terms, so new presidents inherit holdover commissioners and then fill openings as they come up. They also usually limit how many members can come from one party, which is supposed to keep the work from swinging sharply with each election.
The new rule changes that balance in a way that is not entirely clean. Presidents will now routinely remove commissioners from the opposing party, and when power changes hands, the next president may inherit agencies made up entirely of the other side. If the Senate is controlled by that same opposing party, it may have little reason to confirm new nominees. The president is then left with a choice that is hard to square: keep commissioners whose views do not match his own, or fire them and risk an agency without a quorum.
That is the part of the ruling that cuts against its own logic. A decision meant to give presidents more control can leave some of them with essentially no control at all if the agency cannot act and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act does not apply, as it does not to most multimember commissions. In practical terms, presidents who want an agency to stop functioning may have an easier time than presidents who want it to do anything.
Roberts’ opinion pushes the federal structure toward the executive, but the first tests will come in the agencies that now sit closest to a partisan cliff. Trump showed last year how quickly a quorum problem can freeze work that Congress expected to continue, and the court’s ruling gives future presidents a stronger tool without guaranteeing they will like the result. The unanswered question is not whether presidents can fire more freely now. It is which agencies will be able to keep working once they do.
