The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision allowing President Donald Trump to remove Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, and in doing so, overturned much of the nearly 90-year-old Humphrey's Executor precedent that had shielded independent agency leaders from presidential firing power. But if Justice Neil Gorsuch has his way, that ruling was only the opening move in a far larger constitutional reckoning.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, holding that the FTC "unquestionably exercises executive power" and that its commissioners must therefore remain accountable to the president. The holding was deliberately narrow, limited to the question of presidential removal authority. Roberts did not address how much power Congress may give executive agencies to write rules or resolve disputes. He also explicitly deferred questions about the Federal Reserve and similar institutions.
Gorsuch, however, was not content to stop there. His concurring opinion read less like a victory lap and more like a blueprint for future litigation, a point legal experts on both sides noticed immediately.
In pointed language, Gorsuch acknowledged that the ruling reassigned the so-called "fourth branch" powers to the president, but warned that the underlying structural problem remained unsolved.
"The fourth branch's powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President. The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists. The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white."
That line captures the tension at the heart of the case. The majority gave the president the authority to fire agency heads. Gorsuch wants the Court to go further and ask whether those agencies should hold such sweeping power in the first place.
He laid down a marker for where the Court should head next:
"From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts."
In other words, stripping removal protections from agency commissioners is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper constitutional question, whether Congress can continue outsourcing its lawmaking and adjudicative functions to executive-branch bureaucracies, remains open. And Gorsuch clearly wants it answered.
Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said the ruling sets the stage for a new wave of litigation targeting the structure of independent agencies themselves. She told Fox News Digital:
"I think the next step in this type of litigation won't be looking at firings per se, but really trying to make sure all of these administrative agencies actually fall into one of our constitutional buckets. Are they executive agencies or are they legislative or are they judicial? You can't straddle all of this."
That framing gets at the core absurdity of the modern regulatory state. Agencies like the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board have for decades combined functions that the Constitution assigns to three separate branches. They write rules with the force of law. They prosecute violations of those rules. And they adjudicate disputes arising from them, all under one roof.
Severino added that more work remains to strip agencies now under executive control of the functions "that really aren't fundamentally executive in nature." The current Supreme Court term has already shown a willingness to revisit long-settled assumptions about federal power, and this ruling accelerates that trend.
Haley Proctor, a constitutional law professor at Notre Dame Law School, described Gorsuch's concurrence as "a roadmap for future legal challenges." She told Fox News Digital:
"I do think what Justice Gorsuch is pointing out is that this is the first step toward rethinking the way in which the administrative state is empowered and structured."
Proctor went further, outlining what a second wave of challenges could look like:
"If we're concerned about the amount of power that the Federal Trade Commission has, then the next step would be to reconsider giving that power to the Federal Trade Commission because some of the decisions that it's making could be made by Congress instead and some of the decisions that it's making could be made by the courts."
The precedent the Court overturned, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, decided in 1935, had long served as the constitutional scaffolding for the modern independent agency. It held that Congress could create agencies whose leaders the president could not fire at will, insulating them from direct executive control. For nearly nine decades, that framework allowed a vast regulatory apparatus to operate with limited presidential oversight.
The Trump administration had signaled for months that it intended to bring this question before the Court. The Washington Examiner reported that Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris formally declared the Department of Justice's intent to urge the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey's Executor, stating: "To the extent that Humphrey's Executor requires otherwise, the Department intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision." Both Justices Clarence Thomas and Gorsuch had previously signaled their view that the precedent should fall.
The case arose from Trump's firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat appointed in 2018. Just the News reported that Slaughter sued, arguing Trump lacked the authority to remove her. America First Legal filed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn the precedent, with AFL President Gene Hamilton declaring: "The Federal Trade Commission undoubtedly exercises executive power. The President necessarily must be able to remove any official who does so."
The Court agreed, by a comfortable margin.
President Trump celebrated the decision on Truth Social. Newsmax reported that Trump wrote: "BIG WIN just moments ago at the Supreme Court, in the Slaughter Case, confirming Presidential Power in our Country to remove Executive Branch Officers and Agency Appointees, or Representatives, under Article II." The ruling could affect more than two dozen independent federal agencies, though the Court took care to note the Federal Reserve's unique historical status.
That carve-out for the Fed is worth watching. National Review noted that in a related earlier ruling, an emergency stay in Trump v. Wilcox allowing the removal of NLRB and Merit Systems Protection Board members, the Court explicitly described the Federal Reserve as a "uniquely structured, quasi-private entity" with a distinct historical tradition. The majority in that case wrote: "Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf."
The Fed's exemption may hold for now. But the logic of the majority opinion, that agencies exercising executive power must answer to the president, is a principle that does not stop neatly at the FTC's front door.
The ruling leaves several major questions unresolved. The Court did not decide whether agencies can continue exercising quasi-legislative power, writing binding regulations that carry the force of law, or quasi-judicial power, adjudicating disputes through internal administrative tribunals rather than Article III courts. Those are the questions Gorsuch's concurrence puts squarely on the table.
The practical implications are significant. If future rulings follow the path Gorsuch outlined, Congress would need to reclaim the rulemaking authority it has delegated to agencies over decades. Courts would need to take back the adjudicative functions that agencies currently perform in-house. The result would be a dramatically smaller, more constrained regulatory apparatus, one that looks more like the constitutional design the Founders envisioned.
This is not a fringe position. The Court's recent willingness to reassert constitutional boundaries on executive and legislative power has been a defining feature of the Roberts Court in its current configuration. The overturning of Chevron deference, the curtailing of agency enforcement overreach, and now the dismantling of Humphrey's Executor all point in the same direction: a judiciary that is no longer willing to rubber-stamp the delegation of vast, unchecked power to unelected bureaucrats.
Whether the Court's six-justice majority will follow Gorsuch's concurrence to its logical conclusion remains to be seen. Roberts, characteristically, kept the holding narrow. But Gorsuch's opinion is now part of the public record, a detailed invitation for litigants to bring the next round of challenges. And given the internal dynamics of the current Court, there is reason to believe those challenges will find a receptive audience.
The three dissenting justices were not named in the Fox News report, but the 6-3 split follows the familiar pattern of the Court's Republican-appointed majority moving to restore structural constitutional limits while the liberal wing resists. That pattern has defined the Court's most consequential recent terms, from gun rights cases to separation-of-powers disputes.
For decades, Congress found it convenient to hand its hardest decisions to agencies staffed by people no voter ever chose. Those agencies wrote the rules, enforced the rules, and judged whether the rules were broken, all while insulated from the president who is constitutionally responsible for executing the law. The Supreme Court just told the country that arrangement cannot stand, at least when it comes to who gets fired.
Gorsuch is asking the harder question: whether the arrangement can stand at all.
If the answer is no, the administrative state as Washington has known it for nine decades is not just losing its armor. It is losing its foundation. And the people who built careers on the assumption that unelected regulators could govern without meaningful accountability may finally have to answer to the constitutional structure they spent a century working around.