The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on 29 June 2026 in Trump v Slaughter, expanding the president’s authority over independent federal agencies in a case built around Rebecca Slaughter’s firing from the FTC. The decision reaches beyond her removal and weakens the job protections that had limited presidential control over those agencies.
Rebecca Slaughter and the FTC
Slaughter was appointed in 2018 to serve as a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission. She received the email saying she had been fired in March 2025 while helping with rehearsal for her child’s elementary school play, and she said, “My stomach just dropped.”
After the firing, she said, “I was really hoping that it would avoid us, both because I love my job, but really more because I love the agency.” She also said, “I just knew this was going to be a big fight and pretty unpleasant and pretty destructive to this institution that I really valued.”
March 2025 lawsuit
She called Alvaro Bedoya after she was fired. He had also been fired, and the two filed a lawsuit a few days later challenging their terminations. Bedoya later resigned from the FTC because he was not being compensated and could not afford to be without income.
A federal judge reinstated Slaughter in July 2025, but the Trump administration appealed. In September 2025, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to remove her while the case continued and agreed to take up the dispute.
Humphrey’s Executor
The Trump administration sought to have the Supreme Court overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that set limits on presidential power over independent agencies. When the court agreed to hear the case in September 2025, Slaughter said, “That was not a great sign.”
She added that if the court did not want to overturn a 91-year-old precedent, “they would have not taken the case,” and said she still would not “cede to something that I thought was wrong on law, wrong on policy, wrong on principle. I was going to do the best I could fighting it out.”
After the ruling, Slaughter said it is hard to understand how “the civil service survives at all,” and said the decision affects “all protections for all of the government workers, the employment protections for government workers that ensure that we don’t have a wildly swinging, entirely politicized government workforce.”
The ruling leaves independent agencies under greater presidential control, and the source does not identify any further court step after the 29 June 2026 decision. For fired officials and agency workers with statutory protections, the practical question now is how far the new rule will reach across the rest of the federal system.
