Supreme Court Greenlights Trump Firings of Independent Agency Officials

WASHINGTON, May 23, 2025 – In a move likely to reverberate through independent federal agencies, the Supreme Court on Thursday gave President Donald Trump the green light to remove two regulatory officials without cause – a decision that could doom a parallel legal challenge filed by a pair of recently ousted Democratic Federal Trade Commission commissioners.

The justices granted an emergency stay of lower court orders that had blocked Trump’s terminations of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris. The unsigned order marks a sharp break from nearly a century of precedent limiting executive interference in quasi-independent regulatory bodies.

The opinion cited the officers’ “considerable executive power” as grounds for permitting their removal, invoking the Court’s decision in Seila Law v. CFPB. The 2020 case clarified that the president has the right to remove “lesser executive officers” at will, but carved out exceptions for multi-member expert panels and inferior officers with no executive authority. 

In the two-page ruling, the majority conspicuously avoided any reference to the landmark 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that Congress may restrict the president’s ability to remove commissioners from independent, quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies.

In a fiery dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the majority of effectively letting Trump “overrule Humphrey’s by fiat.”

“Today’s order,” she wrote, “favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument needed to discipline our decision-making.”

Kagan said the court decision, which she viewed as procedurally flawed, would have wide impact among federal regulatory bodies. 

“The majority… has foretold a massive change in the law – reducing Humphrey’s to nothing and depriving members of the NLRB, MSPB, and many other independent agencies of tenure protections,” Kagan wrote. “And it has done so on the emergency docket, with little time, scant briefing, and no argument.”

She noted that this case isn't just about the NLRB or MSPB, but many others, among them, “the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Reserve Board.”

Just two days earlier, a district judge heard oral arguments in a closely related case challenging Trump’s abrupt removal of Democratic FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in March.

During that hearing, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, a Biden appointee, expressed skepticism that the Court could uphold Trump’s actions without first overturning Humphrey’s, which has stood unchallenged for 90 years. 

The Supreme Court’s stay doesn’t decide the case. But, it does block reinstatement of Wilcox and Harris while the appeals process plays out. The D.C. Circuit will now decide whether the removals were constitutional. That ruling will likely come in late summer or early fall.

“The only way out of that box,” Kagan wrote, “is to upend Humphrey’s.”