Trump v. Slaughter

[Argued December 8, 2025. Decided June 29, 2026, on writ of certiorari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The syllabus sets out the line-up in these words: “ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS, J., joined as to all but Part III–B. GORSUCH, J., filed a concurring opinion. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN and JACKSON, JJ., joined.” No vote tally is printed anywhere; six and three is arithmetic, not something the Court announced. Read the joinder line carefully. Every Justice in the majority joined the whole opinion except Justice Thomas, who withheld his vote from Part III–B alone — the Part that reserves the question of the Federal Reserve. Nothing on the page tells you why; he filed no separate writing here. This reading labels every passage below with the Part it comes from.]

[A note on citations. This reading carries no page numbers of any kind. The opinion was released as a slip opinion; its running heads print Cite as: 609 U. S. ____ (2026), with the first page left blank, because the United States Reports volume for this Term does not yet exist. There is no reporter pagination to cite — and the slip’s own pagination restarts at 1 four separate times, for the syllabus and for each of the three opinions, so a slip page number would mean four things at once. Rather than print a number that would be false the moment the bound volume issues, this reading identifies every authority by name and every opinion in this case by its author and its Part. The volume-and-year citation lives in the frontmatter and nowhere else; the course has done this before, in the Sheetz note and in Biden v. Nebraska. The slip carries the Court’s notice that the opinion “is subject to formal revision before publication.”]

[What has been left out. The opinion of the Court runs thirty-six slip pages, Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence sixteen, and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent forty-nine. Everything not in italic brackets is the Court’s own text. The heaviest cutting falls on Part II–A of the Court’s opinion — its account of the Constitutional Convention and the Decision of 1789 — and on Part IV. Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence appears in all of its parts, his opening intellectual history condensed to a bracket; the dissent is edited generously but not completely. The Court’s footnotes are described in brackets rather than printed with numbers. One page of the dissent, its slip page 33, was not obtained in acquisition and is marked below where it falls; nothing has been supplied in its place. A companion case decided the same day, Trump v. Cook, is cited by both sides here; it is a separate decision with its own docket and a different majority, and is not reproduced.]

[The facts. The Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914. It is headed by five Commissioners, appointed by the President with the Senate’s advice and consent, serving staggered seven-year terms, no more than three from one political party, and removable by the President only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” When President Trump began his second term in January 2025, the Commission had two Republican and three Democratic members. He designated a new Chair from among them, and the departing Chair resigned, leaving the Commission split two to two. In March 2025, with a replacement nomination pending in the Senate, the President fired the two remaining Democratic Commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. He asserted no inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance; he told them their continued service was “inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities” and that they were removed “pursuant to [his] authority under Article II of the Constitution.”]

[Slaughter sued for relief restoring her to office, alleging that her removal was ultra vires and violated both the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution. (Bedoya joined the suit, then resigned; his claims were dismissed as moot.) The District Court for the District of Columbia granted her summary judgment, holding itself bound by Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which in 1935 upheld this very removal provision as applied to this very agency. A divided panel of the D. C. Circuit denied a stay pending appeal, holding that the Government had no prospect of success because the question had been settled by Humphrey’s Executor; Judge Rao dissented. This Court stayed the District Court’s order and granted certiorari before judgment. By the time the case was decided, the Commission had two members.]

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[CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court. Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined all of it. Justice Thomas joined all of it except Part III–B. The opinion opens, before Part I, with the constitutional premise and the holding.]

[The opinion opens by recalling that the Framers vested “[t]he executive Power” in one person, over objections that “unity in the Executive magistracy” would be “the foetus of monarchy,” because a “plurality in the executive” “tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility”; and that a century ago Myers v. United States held that the Constitution “grants to the President” the “general administrative control of those executing the laws, including the power of appointment and removal of executive officers,” since the President must be able to “remov[e] those for whom he can not continue to be responsible.”]

Today we confront one of several regulatory agencies that deviate from this model of Presidential supervision—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes. Not only does it promulgate rules that carry the force of law, but it also enforces those rules against private parties, collecting civil penalties in the billions of dollars. Its powers, however, do not belong to the President or his appointees alone; they instead belong to five Commissioners, each of whom serves for seven years and may be removed by the President only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” 15 U. S. C. §41.

We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

[Part I recounts the facts set out above. Part II–A argues from text, structure, and founding history: that the Framers, having watched the States build governors who were “little more than chairmen of their executive boards,” deliberately chose a single Chief Magistrate; that officers were his “assistants or deputies,” “subject to his superintendence”; and that the power to remove them at will followed necessarily — a reading confirmed, the Court says, by the Decision of 1789, and by Ex parte Hennen, Parsons v. United States, and Myers. Part II–B–2–a reaches Humphrey’s Executor: Roosevelt’s dismissal of William Humphrey in a one-line letter specifying no cause, and the suit for backpay brought by his executor. The Court’s account of what that case held is reproduced here.]

Having to contend with Myers, Humphrey’s said far less. Justice Sutherland, writing for the Court, started by reaffirming that the President possesses “the exclusive and illimitable power” to remove “all purely executive officers,” just as Myers held. He then pivoted. There are some presidentially appointed officials, he explained, who may perform “executive function[s]” but exercise “no part of the executive power.” And for those officials, “the decision in the Myers case cannot be accepted as controlling.”

The Court held that William Humphrey was one such official. That was because the FTC’s duties were very limited—they were “neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.” When courts requested the FTC’s help as a “master in chancery” to recommend appropriate remedies in antitrust litigation, for instance, it acted solely as a judicial aid. When Congress requested the FTC’s help to “mak[e] investigations and reports” on certain topics, it acted solely as a legislative aid. And when it brought (and adjudicated) charges against corporations it suspected of using “unfair methods of competition” in commerce, it acted “in part quasi-legislatively and in part quasi-judicially.” Because these quasi functions did not require the use of “executive power,” Justice Sutherland reasoned, Humphrey needed to answer only to Congress and the courts. Although the President may be the “master in his own house,” he warned, he may not “impos[e] his control in the house of another.”

[Part II–B–2–b. This is the opinion’s account of what happened to Humphrey’s Executor between 1935 and today, and of what the Court now does with Morrison v. Olson, Free Enterprise Fund, and Seila Law. It is reproduced entire. Watch closely: the Court does not overrule Morrison. It enlists Morrison as the case that had already recognized the FTC’s powers to be executive and had already said the question “cannot be made to turn on” the quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial categories — adding the qualifier “at least for inferior officers,” and contradicting the dissent’s contrary reading of Morrison in the same breath.]

From the start, Humphrey’s was tethered to a highly circumscribed and almost fictional view of the FTC’s role. Humphrey’s by its terms applied only to agencies that occupy “no place in the executive department,” are “independent of executive authority,” and exercise “no part of the executive power.” Indeed, Justice Sutherland took pains to emphasize that “the character of the office”—executive or nonexecutive—would determine the result of future cases, and to reiterate that the Court’s decision was limited “to officers of the kind here under consideration.”

In later cases, although Humphrey’s announced dividing line remained intact, more and more functions, we concluded, in fact fell on the executive side of that line—and thus within the President’s exclusive control. Where Humphrey’s suggested that the power to enforce the law against particular parties could be merely “quasi-judicial,” or “in aid” of federal courts, we held the opposite. “A lawsuit is the ultimate remedy for a breach of the law,” we explained in 1976, “and it is to the President, and not to the Congress, that the Constitution entrusts the responsibility to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ ” Buckley v. Valeo (per curiam). And where Humphrey’s suggested that the power to “fill[ ] in” “the details” of a “general standard” could be merely “quasi-legislative,” or “in aid” of Congress, we again held the opposite. Although “some administrative agency action … may resemble ‘lawmaking,’ ” we explained in 1983, when an agency exercises “legislatively delegated authority” to regulate private conduct, it exercises “[e]xecutive” power. INS v. Chadha; see also Bowsher v. Synar (“Interpreting a law enacted by Congress to implement the legislative mandate is the very essence of ‘execution’ of the law.”).

Soon enough, we recognized that Humphrey’s flunked even its own test. “[I]t is hard to dispute that the powers of the FTC,” even “at the time of Humphrey’s Executor,” we explained in 1988, “would at the present time be considered ‘executive,’ at least to some degree.” Morrison v. Olson. Not one for understatement, Justice Scalia observed in dissent that the Court had “swept” Humphrey’s “into the dustbin of repudiated constitutional principles.” The Court put the matter more delicately, but no less definitively. “We undoubtedly did rely on the terms ‘quasi-legislative’ and ‘quasi-judicial’ ” in Humphrey’s, the Court noted, “but our present considered view is that” the constitutional question “cannot be made to turn on” such “rigid categories,” at least for inferior officers. Contra (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (asserting that Morrison v. Olson in fact “applied and expanded Humphrey’s”).

Fast forward another few decades, and Humphrey’s premises had been further undermined. In two cases, Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we again considered the permissibility of restrictions on the President’s power of removal. In both cases, we reiterated Myers’s rule that the President exercises “general administrative control of those executing the laws” and thus must be able to “remov[e] those for whom he can not continue to be responsible.” In both cases, we emphasized that Humphrey’s had to be read “on its own terms,” and thus applies only to agencies that perform ” ‘specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid.’ ” And in both cases, we refused to extend Humphrey’s to a “new situation”—in Free Enterprise Fund, two layers of for-cause removal within an agency, and in Seila Law, for-cause removal protection for the sole head of an agency. As we put it in Seila Law, Humphrey’s is not a “freestanding invitation for Congress” to limit the President’s constitutional power.

Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time. While Humphrey’s was surely right to focus on “the character of the office” at issue, and surely right to say that “purely executive” powers must be controlled by the President, we long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive. Forty years have now passed, in fact, since we recognized that the FTC exercises executive power—and did so even in 1935, when Humphrey’s was decided. See Morrison; id. (Scalia, J., dissenting); see also Seila Law. And more than 200 years have passed since we recognized that the Constitution “vests the whole executive power in the President” alone. Osborn v. Bank of United States (Marshall, C. J., for the Court).

At this point, all that is left of Humphrey’s is its observation that an agency that “exercises no part of the executive power” need not fall within the rule of Presidential removal; see Mistretta v. United States (Scalia, J., dissenting) (explaining that Humphrey’s stands only for the proposition that there would be “no strict constitutional impediment to a ‘branchless’ agency” that exercises “no governmental power”). If Congress wishes to establish independent agencies to assist it with its functions, it may do so. Cf. Buckley. But it may not foist those agencies upon the President, and thus deprive him of “the executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution”—something Humphrey’s itself never purported to permit.

[Part II–B–2–c. The overruling, and the stare decisis analysis.]

If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale. As we have often said, stare decisis is not an “inexorable command,” Payne v. Tennessee, and is at its weakest in constitutional cases, where only we may readily fix our own mistakes, Agostini v. Felton. Our precedents about precedent teach that a number of factors are relevant. Here, every factor—the “quality” of the decision’s reasoning, its “consistency” with our other cases, the “workability” of its rule, and the interests of those who have “reli[ed]” on it, Knick v. Township of Scott—counsels in favor of letting Humphrey’s go.

Humphrey’s has been difficult to make sense of from the start. “[O]nly by blind feats of definition” could the Court transform powers that are quintessentially executive—investigative and prosecutorial alike—into nonexecutive “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” functions. As Justice Jackson memorably put it, Humphrey’s “retreat to the qualifying ‘quasi’ is implicit with confession that all recognized classifications have broken down, and ‘quasi’ is a smooth cover which we draw over our confusion as we might use a counterpane to conceal a disordered bed.” FTC v. Ruberoid Co. (dissenting opinion). When an agency “executes” a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power—no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.

For that reason, Humphrey’s is now far out of step with our cases, which have all but limited it to its facts. We applied it only once, in 1958, to a solely adjudicatory body dealing with claims for compensation from those imprisoned or interned in the Second World War. Wiener v. United States. Little surprise, then, that no one knows how to apply Humphrey’s in practice. Does it protect all multimember agencies? Or only those balanced along partisan lines? Those that wield some executive power, but not a lot? With its indeterminacy, Humphrey’s “has undermined the very ‘rule of law’ values that stare decisis exists to secure.” Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

All that is left is reliance. Slaughter argues that Congress has relied upon Humphrey’s to create agencies “insulated from presidential control.” That is precisely the problem. Independent agencies are insulated “from the President,” “not from politics.” FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. (plurality opinion). Congress may well have relied on Humphrey’s in taking more power for itself, but that is hardly one of the “legitimate” reliance interests that our precedents contemplate. No branch may rely on adverse possession to claim power that the Constitution vests elsewhere.

[A footnote here answers the dissent’s claim that “[i]ndependence was centrally important to Congress in creating these agencies,” replying that the point is “relevant only in the context of severability,” and closing: “In any event, the solution to ‘an Executive Branch that Congress never dreamed of establishing’ … is not a headless fourth branch that the Framers never dreamed of establishing.”]

The dissent contends that we ignore the reliance interests of “[o]rdinary Americans and regulated firms alike.” Quite the contrary. “In its valiant search for reliance interests,” it is “the dissent [that] somehow misses maybe the most important one: the reliance interests of the American people … in the preservation of our constitutionally promised liberties.” Ramos v. Louisiana.

[Part III–A. The application to the FTC.]

With these principles in mind, this is not a close case. The FTC’s for-cause removal provision violates the separation of powers. In its present form, the FTC enforces and administers some 80 statutes, covering almost every facet of our Nation’s economy. The tasks it undertakes are “the very essence of ‘execution’ of the law.” Bowsher.

First, the FTC has the power to promulgate substantive rules that carry the force of law—giving content, for instance, to the startlingly abstract idea of “acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive.” The power to flesh out such statutory regimes, through discretionary actions largely outside the remit of courts, is executive through and through. Second, the FTC not only investigates businesses to ensure they comply with its statutes and rules, but enforces those rules through in-house adjudications; this power, too, is executive. And third, the FTC files civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court, selecting its remedies freely. As we have said many times, the “discretionary power to seek judicial relief” lies at the very core of executive authority. Buckley. That “quintessentially executive” power may not be cleaved off from the Executive Branch. Seila Law.

The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive, in whom such power is vested. It follows, then, that Slaughter served as the President’s subordinate at the FTC—and that the President was entitled to cut her tenure short.

[Part III–B — the Part JUSTICE THOMAS did not join. It runs two slip pages and is reproduced here entire. Nothing in the opinion, the syllabus, or any separate opinion in this case explains his withheld joinder; he filed no separate writing. Note what the Part does and does not do. It reserves two questions rather than deciding them, and the ground it gives for the Federal Reserve reservation is history and tradition — Myers’s own reliance on “contemporaneous legislative exposition,” and the lineage of the First and Second Banks of the United States.]

Because the FTC’s activities fall well within the heartland of executive power, we have no occasion today to define the bounds of what such power entails. As our precedents recognize, not all offices created by Congress necessarily come with executive or even sovereign power attached. See, e.g., Buckley (contrasting the “discretionary power to seek judicial relief” with powers “of an investigative and informative nature,” which may “be regarded as merely in aid of the legislative function of Congress”). To suggest otherwise would come as a surprise to, among other congressionally chartered entities, the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturalists, and Georgetown University.

Relatedly, we have left open the possibility that some functions traditionally handled outside the Executive Branch may not be encompassed by Myers’s general rule. Indeed, Myers itself placed “the greatest weight” on the early Congresses’ (and early Presidents’) “contemporaneous legislative exposition” of the Executive’s constitutional role. And one example we have given of an entity that may have such a unique role is the Federal Reserve, to the extent that it follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States—both of which influenced monetary policy and neither of which were subject to plenary Presidential control. See Seila Law. Our prior cases do not necessarily implicate the constitutionality of such arrangements. Our opinion today should not be read to do so either.

Nor do we determine the fate of officials not before us. In particular, as the Solicitor General recognized at argument, the permissibility of tenure protections for the judges of “non-Article III courts,” such as the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims, is not “presented” or “briefed” in this case and poses a “different set of questions.” We leave those questions for another day. All we do today is recognize what has been clear for a century—that those who fall within the President’s “general administrative control” must be removable by the President at will. Myers.

[Part IV answers Slaughter and the dissent. Slaughter, the Chief Justice observes, concedes much: that officers with “purely executive functions,” like the “postmaster in Myers,” must be removable at will; that “Seila Law is correct”; and that “the Vesting Clause of Article II … establish[es] a general default presidential removal power.” The dissent, by contrast, “sweeps the chess pieces off the board, rejecting not only Free Enterprise Fund and Seila Law but Myers and the Decision of 1789 as well.” The Court answers the dissent’s Federalist arguments — reading Madison’s No. 39 reference to the “tenure” of “ministerial offices” as contemplating fixed terms subject to removal in the interim, and treating Hamilton’s “displace” in No. 77 as ambiguous between “remove” and “replace” and superseded by his 1793 statement that “[t]he power of removal from office” forms part of “the EXECUTIVE POWER of the Nation” — and answers its readings of Story and of the early multimember bodies. On modern practice, it says:]

“Today,” the dissent notes, “dozens of agencies are headed by commissioners or board members removable only for cause,” and “this longstanding practice” (it contends) “should be entitled to significant weight.” We have never endorsed such a practice-makes-perfect theory of congressional power, and in fact rejected it in INS v. Chadha. At issue there were the nearly 300 legislative vetoes adopted by the political branches over 50 years. As we saw matters, the popularity of the congressional veto only “sharpened” our review. Such ” ‘political inventions’ ” must remain subject to “the demands of the Constitution,” lest the political branches amend by agreement “integral parts of the constitutional design.” We say the same today.

[The Chief Justice then charges the dissent with defending “a version of Humphrey’s that does not exist”: only “halfway through a footnote” does it acknowledge that Humphrey’s described the FTC as sharing “no part of the executive power,” and nowhere does it argue that today’s FTC exercises “no part of the executive power” or occupies “no place in the executive department.” “The dissent may not keep the parts of Humphrey’s it likes and discard the rest. At least we have accorded Humphrey’s a respectful burial; the dissent would cast Myers aside without a second thought.”]

[Slaughter proposes that the Court police Congress’s structural choices only for “reasonableness.” That, the Chief Justice replies, “is neither limiting nor much of a principle”: on her view Congress could commandeer the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Commerce and Education, and “most (if not at all) of the Department of Justice.”]

The answer, then as now, is that these officers exercise the President’s power, not their own, and thus must be responsible to him. We do not allow intrusions on Article I nor on Article III. See INS v. Chadha; Stern v. Marshall. We see no reason to allow intrusions on Article II either.

Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President. That President is not all powerful—not by any means. See, e.g., Ex parte Milligan; Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer; United States v. Nixon. But he is not impotent either. To “discharg[e] the duties of his trust,” he must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.

The judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

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[JUSTICE GORSUCH, concurring. He joined the Chief Justice’s opinion in full and wrote separately, at sixteen slip pages, to say what he thinks follows from it. No commentary supplied to this course anticipated this opinion; it is the least reported and, for a course in the separation of powers, perhaps the most consequential writing in the case. It is given here in all of its parts.]

To fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, the Court holds, the President must have the ability to remove principal officers who exercise executive power in his name. That includes those who run independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). With all this, I agree.

But neither can I ignore the implications that follow. Today, independent agencies do not just exercise executive law-enforcement powers. Congress has also delegated to them vast legislative and judicial powers, effectively allowing these agencies to make laws and decide disputes under them. And, after today’s decision, the President can effectively exercise all those powers too.

It’s a development that raises important questions, not least these: Would Congress have delegated so much power, including legislative and judicial power, to independent agencies had it known that the President would come to control them? How will Congress respond now—if realistically it can? And what, if anything, will this Court do about it?

[Parts I–A through I–C. Justice Gorsuch begins with intellectual history. In the early 20th century, he writes, scholars including Woodrow Wilson and James Landis concluded that our “simple tripartite form of government” was “inadequa[te] … to deal with modern problems” and had become “unworkable,” and that the project of “distinguish[ing] … between” legislative, executive, and judicial powers had to “g[i]ve way … to the exigencies of governance.” Three ideas were central to the resulting model of “[p]ublic administration”: that agencies be staffed by technical “expert[s]”; that those experts be insulated from political control, since on Wilson’s view “popular sovereignty” entrusted too much to a “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish” people, and letting the public near the new bureaucracies would be like letting “a rustic handl[e] delicate machinery”; and that the experts hold not merely executive but “legislative power,” “executive power,” and “whatever power might be required to achieve the desired results.” Part I–B turns to how the plan met reality. Congress created the FTC in 1914, through legislation signed by President Wilson himself, and the notion that such agencies would be led by neutral experts soon looked “quaint” — William Humphrey proves the point. His qualification for the seat “wasn’t so much his technical expertise as his loyalty to the Republican party then holding the White House,” and politics is what made him a target: Roosevelt alleged no inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance, but “could not tolerate the ‘adamant[ly] conservative’ Humphrey holding influence over the FTC during ‘an important phase of the New Deal.’ ” Part I–C observes that while the Wilsonian vision of neutral expertise buckled early, one feature stuck: those in charge of the new agencies “often became very difficult to dislodge” — “political actors—like Humphrey—insulated from politics?” Roosevelt, who had good reason to think Myers protected him, “was completely infuriated” when this Court “brushed Myers aside,” so much so that it “may very well have been [Humphrey’s], even more than the other decisions of 1935, which provided the motive for” the Court-packing plan.]

But if Humphrey’s invited very different reactions, there was perhaps one thing nearly everyone could agree on. After the Court’s ruling, Congress rolled out one new “independent” agency after another. Of course, the term “independent” was always a bit of a misnomer. But the leadership of these new agencies at least enjoyed protection against at-will presidential removal. And Congress turned out so many new independent agencies that a committee President Roosevelt assembled a few years later complained of the rise of a new “headless ‘fourth branch’ of the Government, a haphazard deposit of irresponsible agencies and uncoordinated powers,” one that did “violence to the basic theory of the American Constitution.”

[Part I–D. The delegation that followed.]

Congress’s newfound ability to insulate agencies from direct presidential control may have encouraged it to lean into the last essential pillar of Wilson’s design too. In Humphrey’s wake, Congress increasingly assigned broad powers to the agencies it created, including legislative and judicial powers. Before Humphrey’s, delegating those sorts of authorities to an agency risked “merely increasing” the President’s own power—he might remove agency heads and seek new ones who would do his bidding. But Humphrey’s changed the equation, making independent agencies more tempting repositories for delegated powers that the President could not access with quite such ease.

The result? Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the Nation’s affairs. They regulate our businesses, and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. They determine what toys our children will play with, and how we interact with each other at work. And, as the dissent explains, so much more. Often, these agencies do all this with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority. The FTC, for example, enjoys what the Court calls the “startlin[g]” power to define, outlaw, and prosecute any ” ‘acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive.’ ” One could go on.

Nor have these agencies hesitated to employ the powers Congress has given them. In 2024, the SEC took on climate change. That same year, the FTC sought to ban nearly all employee noncompete agreements nationwide. And then there’s late-night comedy. Last year, taking objection to a network host’s on-air remarks, the Chairman of the FCC suggested there would be “additional work … ahead” for the agency if broadcasting companies did not “find ways to … take action.” Some independent agencies even have de facto authority to create new crimes. By the 1990s, one scholar estimated that “over 300,000 federal regulations,” many of them adopted by independent agencies, “may be enforced criminally.”

Over time, Congress has afforded agencies not just sweeping legislative powers but judicial ones as well, including the power to decide cases and controversies affecting Americans’ private rights. We have recently begun addressing whether some of these schemes comply with Article III’s assurance of an independent judge, the Seventh Amendment’s promise of a jury trial, and the Due Process Clause’s guarantee of a fair trial before a fair tribunal. See SEC v. Jarkesy. Even so, certain of those schemes persist.

Would Congress have gone so far down this road, delegating so much legislative and judicial power to agencies, without Humphrey’s assurance that their leaders would enjoy protection against at-will presidential removal? Maybe. After all, Congress has also granted expansive authorities to various “executive” agencies whose heads have been subject to at-will presidential removal all along. But very possibly not. Humphrey’s itself described removal protections as “essential” to the FTC’s structure. Ms. Slaughter cites evidence that ” ‘[a]t no point was it proposed that [an FTC] ought to be set up unless it be independent.’ ” My dissenting colleagues share the same view too.

[Part II–A. What today’s decision means.]

The Court’s decision today may take aim at removal protections and, in that way, one part of Wilson’s vision. But, as we have seen, other parts never fully materialized. It was never the case that neutral experts alone led the agencies Congress created. And it was never true that those agencies were entirely insulated from politics or even presidential influence. Nor can the demise of one more vestige of Wilson’s ambitions come as a surprise. As the Court persuasively explains, Myers was right all along and so was President Roosevelt: Humphrey’s did “violence to the basic theory of the American Constitution,” which leaves no room for a “headless ‘fourth branch.’ ” Instead, those who exercise executive power must be accountable through a “chain of dependence” running from the “lowest officers” to “the President,” and from him to the sovereign American people.

But if today’s decision represents an important step back toward the Constitution, it’s also worth considering the implications it holds for the last remaining pillar of Wilson’s plan. Apparently relying on the assumption that it can afford their leaders some protection against presidential removal, Congress has not just assigned executive law-enforcement power to independent agencies. It has delegated extensive lawmaking and adjudicative functions to them as well. Today’s decision may not have occasion to address those delegations directly, but it carries weighty consequences for them. Open-ended delegations of legislative power have not gone away; now they will just be exercised by agency officials who answer to the President. The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists, but now the pen ultimately rests in the President’s hand. The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white.

The whole of the President’s authority also may be greater than the sum of its parts. It would be one thing if today’s decision afforded the White House more control over the airwaves. Or financial markets. Or energy. But Presidents now will enjoy waxing authority over all those areas and more. A business out of favor with the party in control of the White House might be able to stave off an FCC investigation. But can it survive a subsequent FTC rule declaring unlawful one of its longstanding trade practices? What about an in-house adjudication by OSHA? Or a prosecution for a new crime the SEC announces? It may be true that after today there is no more “fourth branch” of government. But the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President.

[Justice Gorsuch adds that Presidents have other tools for consolidating control: decades of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs review of proposed agency action, extended by executive order in 2025 to many independent agencies; and the power to classify positions as “of a confidential policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character,” exempt from ordinary civil-service protections, a classification recently extended to “tens of thousands” of additional positions.]

So, yes, those who exercise executive power must be ultimately answerable to the President and, through him, to the American people. But while electoral accountability is a good thing, it cannot be the only thing. And allowing Presidents to control not only executive functions, but also vast new reservoirs of legislative and judicial powers, risks inviting exactly what those who framed our Constitution feared: the “accumulation of all powers … in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective.” The Federalist No. 47 (J. Madison) (emphasis added). No nation, after all, can expect happy results when “the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person”—or, one might add, when judicial powers are added to that union.

[Part II–B. Who will address the risk.]

If allowing so much legislative and judicial power to accumulate in the President’s hands invites real risks, the question becomes: Who will address them?

At first blush, the most natural answer might seem Congress. Aware now that the premise on which it apparently proceeded was flawed—independent agencies are not so independent after all—Congress might wish to reconsider how much power should remain in the President’s hands. But there’s a straightforward problem with that. Congress still possesses tools—most notably its appropriations authority—to “influence how the President exercises” his legislative and judicial functions. But “[a]ny President keen on his own authority … will have a strong incentive to veto” any effort to reclaim those powers. The consequence is a ratchet effect: Authorities Congress once delegated by a simple majority may now require a veto-proof supermajority to retrieve.

Perhaps, then, if any real response is to come it will have to come from this Court. And that’s hardly unfair. To be sure, Congress had a hand in creating the problem we now face. But this Court bears responsibility as well. It was this Court that decided Humphrey’s. It was this Court that sat by while Congress delegated vast legislative and judicial powers to one independent agency after another. And it is this Court that today allows the President to remove those agencies’ leaders and exercise effective control over all their powers. If the task of fixing a problem belongs to those who made it, this Court has some work to do.

Fortunately, the Constitution provides the blueprint for the job ahead. With the assent of the governed, and subject to amendment by them alone, our Constitution created three branches of government—not four, and not just one led by the President either. Congress must make the laws that govern us, the executive branch must faithfully execute those laws, and independent judges and juries must decide disputes that arise under them.

Fortunately, too, this Court already has many doctrines designed to protect the Constitution’s separation of powers. Just as today’s decision holds that Article II requires those who exercise executive power to answer to an elected President, this Court’s nondelegation doctrine recognizes that Article I vests “[a]ll” federal legislative power in Congress and no one else. Of course, Congress can enlist experts to advise it in its work and leave implementation details to others, but the doctrine holds that Congress alone can make laws regulating private conduct. See, e.g., Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan. By that doctrine’s side stands the major questions doctrine, which teaches that, to sustain a claim that Congress has delegated to it some “[e]xtraordinary” regulatory power, an agency must identify “clear” statutory authority for that power. West Virginia v. EPA. Vagueness doctrine can contribute too, with its lesson that “Congress, rather than the executive or judicial branch, [must] define what conduct is sanctionable and what is not.” Sessions v. Dimaya (opinion of KAGAN, J.). And our doctrines addressing Article III, the Due Process Clause, and the Seventh Amendment can help ensure that adjudications of private rights take place where they belong, before independent judges and juries. See Jarkesy (GORSUCH, J., concurring).

We have, then, no shortage of tools. The only real question is whether we will use them. Yes, we often recite, the Constitution contains “a bar on [the] delegation” of “[l]egislative power” to agencies. But we have sometimes shrunk from applying that rule, worried that “our increasingly complex society” cannot manage unless someone else assumes Congress’s job. Yes, we say, when agencies claim “[e]xtraordinary” delegated power, they “must point to clear congressional authorization for” it. But some have also suggested the major questions doctrine might be tainted by an “anti-administrative-state stance,” one that could prevent the “people … found in agencies” “from doing important work.” And, yes, all agree that the Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury in suits at common law. But it can also seem to some that Congress occasionally has “good reaso[n]” to let agencies decide cases anyway given their “greater efficiency and expertise.”

Whatever merit these objections once might have held, they now speak to a bygone era. As my dissenting colleagues see it, removal protections were “centrally important,” or perhaps even ” ‘essential,’ ” to Congress when it decided to create so many independent agencies and delegate so much legislative and judicial power to them. On their account, Congress gave all that power to “specialists” in independent agencies “precisely because [they were] not fully controlled by the White House.” But now removal protections are a thing of the past, and the President enjoys direct control over independent and executive agencies alike. So even if entrusting legislative and judicial powers to insulated, independent agencies once seemed a good idea to some, it’s simply not an option anymore. Now, we face only two ways forward: Let Presidents exercise all those powers or begin subjecting them to the Constitution’s constraints.

The Court today takes a notable step back toward the Constitution. By recognizing that the President is entitled to remove a principal officer who exercises executive power in his name, the Court does much to vindicate what Franklin D. Roosevelt and James Madison both understood: Under our Constitution, executive power does not belong to a “headless ‘fourth branch,’ ” but must be exercised through a “chain of dependence” running from “the lowest officers” to “the President,” and from him to the American people.

At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to think that step is enough on its own. The fact remains that Congress has endowed formerly independent agencies not just with executive authority, but with enormous legislative and judicial powers as well. And now the President enjoys control over all those powers too. 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. We have tolerated adventurous theories long enough. It is time to return, all the way, to the Constitution.

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[JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting. Forty-nine slip pages; Justice Kagan wrote nothing separately in this case. Three arguments organize the dissent: that the Constitution leaves the structure of the Government to the political branches; that a century and a half of practice by Congresses and Presidents settles what the text does not; and that a constitutional rule which admits a single, consequence-driven exception is not much of a constitutional rule.]

For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics. Those include the management of nuclear energy; the security of the monetary supply; and the safety of American workplaces, consumer products, and chemical hazards. In these and many other areas, the wisdom of the centuries has taught that some decisions should depend not only on who is in office—much less on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office—but also on judgment, expertise, and the public good. Over the last 140 years especially, the political branches have pursued that goal by establishing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): bipartisan, multimember bodies with “for-cause” removal protections. More than 90 years ago, this Court affirmed, as to the FTC specifically, that the constitutionality of its members’ “for cause” removal protections “cannot well be doubted.” Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Ever since, Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable Government.

Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong. The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President. In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.

Perhaps worst of all, the Court today forgets its place. Today’s majority decides that it knows better: better than members of the founding generation who created agencies, like the Sinking Fund Commission and the Bank of the United States, free from unfettered Presidential control; better than a century and a half of Congresses and Presidents who created agencies in the FTC’s mold; better than even Hamilton, Story, Webster, Holmes, Brandeis, Frankfurter, and Rehnquist. These great statesmen and Justices knew something that today’s majority apparently does not: that fealty to the Constitution means respecting not just what it says, but what it does not say and by its silence leaves to others to decide. Because the Court ignores these foundational tenets, I respectfully dissent.

[Part II–A–1 — precedent. The dissent reads Humphrey’s Executor as having addressed “the very statute at issue here” and upheld it “against the very same challenge levied in this case.” It reads the majority’s cases the other way around: Youngstown cited Humphrey’s as Justice Jackson’s only example of Presidential power “at its lowest ebb”; Wiener applied it unanimously, per Justice Frankfurter, to the War Claims Commission; Morrison v. Olson “applied and expanded Humphrey’s in a new context”; and Seila Law’s principal opinion “explicitly suggested that Congress could fix” the CFPB’s defect by “converting” it, with all of its powers, “into a multimember agency” just like the FTC. It also denies that the agency has changed: “the FTC of 1935, like today’s FTC, had the power to conduct investigations, make rules, and bring enforcement actions.”]

[Part II–A–2 — historical practice.]

Humphrey’s is not just a longstanding precedent of this Court. It also reflects a “deeply rooted tradition” embraced by all three branches of Government and the American people. Such “longstanding practice” is entitled to ” ‘great weight’ ” in separation-of-powers cases like this one. On “doubtful question[s]” regarding the meaning of the Constitution, historical practice, when “deliberately established” through “legislative acts,” can “put at rest” the Constitution’s meaning. McCulloch v. Maryland. That is so even for practices that “began after the founding era.” NLRB v. Noel Canning. As Justice Scalia explained, constitutional interpretation should reflect “the principles adhered to, over time, by the American people, rather than those favored by the personal (and necessarily shifting) philosophical dispositions of a majority of this Court.”

Fifty years before Humphrey’s was decided, Congress and the President began to reach a settled answer to this question. In 1887, as the railroads grew in strength across the American economy, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, with five Commissioners removable only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Three years later came the nine-member Board of General Appraisers, with the same protection; the Federal Reserve Board followed in 1913; and the next year Congress created the FTC with removal protections aimed at ensuring “a continuous policy,” “free from the effect of … changing [White House] incumbency.” From here, “many more … for-cause removal provisions followed.” Today, dozens of agencies are headed by commissioners or board members removable only for cause. Unlike in other recent cases, in which the Court considered agencies it deemed “historical anomal[ies]” with “no foothold in history or tradition,” here history and tradition point in the opposite direction. Congress, moreover, has acted not only with the Executive Branch’s “acquiesce[nce],” but with the active participation of Presidents across the ideological spectrum. Other than Humphrey’s own removal, the Government struggles to find any Presidential objections to for-cause removal protections like the FTC’s since they came into existence in the late 1800s.

The majority’s only response is INS v. Chadha, which held unconstitutional a 50-year-old procedure by which a single House of Congress could override an executive action. Chadha, however, is no model for today’s decision. It did not involve a practice that had been repeatedly approved by this Court for nearly a century. And it rested on “[e]xplicit and unambiguous provisions of the Constitution”—Article I’s bicameralism and presentment requirements. The majority here, by contrast, identifies no constitutional provision referencing or requiring an unfettered removal power. It rests instead on structural inferences, legislative inaction, congressional debates, legal commentary, and private correspondence. Unlike Chadha, this case does not ask whether 50 years of practice can overcome plain constitutional text. It asks whether the Constitution privileges the majority’s flawed historical account as the final word, impervious to more than a century of later historical development.

[Part II–B–1 — text.]

Beginning at the founding, there is no evidence that those who shaped or ratified the Constitution adopted the majority’s general rule of at-will removal. Indeed, the Court has long noted that, for the most part, “[t]he Constitution is silent with respect to the power of removal from office, where the tenure is not fixed.” Ex parte Hennen. The one exception, and only explicit removal power granted in the Constitution, is for impeachment—a power placed in Congress’s hands, not the President’s. The majority nonetheless claims that its theory comes from Article II’s “vest[ing of] ‘[t]he executive Power’ ” in the President. That assertion begs the question. Does the “executive Power,” in fact, contain an illimitable removal power beyond Congress’s power to “establis[h] by Law” certain offices, as “necessary and proper” to structure the Executive Branch? After all, agencies like the FTC would not even exist if not for Congress’s exercise of its Article I power to create them.

There is little to suggest that “executive Power,” as understood at the time of the founding, was as capacious as the Court today asserts. The powers held by the English Crown and state governors before ratification did not include a removal power that the legislature could not modify. Parliament often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers, and States with vesting clauses like the Constitution’s similarly allowed limits on gubernatorial removal powers. The Framers “never intended” to give the President “the complete set of powers” that the English Crown held, let alone more; they carefully parsed the ” ‘royal prerogative[s]’ ” and assigned many, including the power of office creation, to Congress.

Nor does the Take Care Clause serve as a plausible source for the expansive removal power the majority posits. “[T]he provision—‘he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’—speaks of duty, not power.” As recent scholarship has explained, ” ‘[f]aithful execution’ was proto-fiduciary legal language from centuries of English law that limited the discretion of executive officials” and did “not expan[d] their power.” There is no evidence that anyone understood the Take Care Clause at or near the founding to imply a mandatory, inflexible rule of at-will removal that Congress could never modify.

[Part II–B–2 — the Decision of 1789. “The House in 1789,” the dissent writes, “did not address whether Congress could place limits on the President’s power to remove; it debated whether the President could remove officers at all without Senate consent” — “[t]he great question,” as Hennen put it, “was whether the removal was to be by the President alone, or with the concurrence of the Senate.” The one decision that emerged was that “a congressional role in the removal process was rejected,” Bowsher v. Synar; no version of the bill “suggested that Congress was prohibited entirely from limiting the causes for such removal.” Hence, the dissent says, “nearly every scholar to have studied this episode, even those broadly supportive of the majority’s view, has come to agree that ‘the Decision of 1789 did not endorse the view that Congress lacked authority to modify the Constitution’s grant of removal power to the President.’ ” It then collects early bodies it reads as at least semi-independent — the Sinking Fund Commission and the Mint Board, on both of which sat the Chief Justice, whom the President could not fire; the Revolutionary War Debt Commission, whose members Hamilton called “distinct and Independant Officers”; and the First and Second Banks. It reads Marbury v. Madison as recognizing that an office with a five-year fixed term was “not removable at the will of the executive,” and United States v. Perkins — which the majority does not cite — as holding that Congress ” ‘no doubt’ ” may ” ‘limit and restrict the power of removal’ ” as to inferior officers.]

[Part II–B–4 — what the majority’s theory leaves out.]

Responsiveness and responsibility are certainly valuable, but they are not the only values countenanced by our Constitution. Others are the continuity and stability of Government, and the impartiality and fair administration of justice. Depending on the situation, one value or another may be more or less important. Today, the majority places accountability to the President above all else.

Yet the accountability prized by the majority is not an unalloyed good. From the start, Americans distrusted the “arbitrary authority” that could result from a broad removal power, citing the “baleful influence of the royal prerogative when officers h[e]ld their commission during the pleasure of the Crown.” Story saw unchecked removal authority as risking the “conver[sion of] all the officers of the country into the mere tools and creatures of the president.” Webster, too, observed the “obvious” risk that such a power would breed “complaisance,” “pliant subserviancy, and gross adulation” in place of “patriotic labors,” “independence, and public spirit.”

Balancing all these concerns, and the tradeoffs they entail, has historically fallen to those who know the most about them: the political branches. This Court has proven itself time and again to be the least competent branch to make these judgments. Consider just one example: the Court’s fixation on removal. A “wealth of features” other than at-will removal in fact determines an agency’s responsiveness to the President. The President often names the Chair. He also, through the White House Office of Management and Budget, can “frequently” use the budget process to ” ‘influence [agencies’] policies.’ ” Even with the removal protections the Court today holds unconstitutional, the President can still remove an FTC Commissioner who fails to perform her duties adequately or commits malfeasance in office.

[GAP — slip page 33 of the dissent was not obtained. The acquisition returned 48 of the dissent’s 49 pages; this one did not come back on any query, and it falls exactly here. The preceding page breaks off mid-citation; the following page opens Part III. Nothing has been supplied in its place, from any other source or from memory, and no editorial bridge has been written across it. What is on that page is not characterized here, because it was not read.]

[Part III — stare decisis. “[A]long every metric that the Court usually considers in this context,” the dissent argues, “Humphrey’s should have survived.” The reliance interests are extraordinary: within weeks of Humphrey’s, the House amended the bill establishing the National Labor Relations Board to add removal protections with the express aim of “provid[ing] that the decision of the Supreme Court in the recent Humphreys case shall be embodied in the statute,” and Congress, assured that Humphrey’s “provide[d] ample legal grounds,” promptly reaffirmed for-cause protection for the Governors of the Federal Reserve. The dissent names what today’s decision transforms: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Chemical Safety Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. It attributes the recent confusion in the lower courts to “the Court’s recent emergency-docket abandonment of Humphrey’s.”]

Independence was centrally important to Congress in creating these agencies. “[I]t was essential that the[se] commission[s]” were not “open to the suspicion of partisan direction” and thus possessed the independence “necessary to the effective and fair administration of the law.” Congress recognized not only the need for efficient regulation of an increasingly complex economy, but also the risks of concentrating such power in the President’s hands with no check against partisan control.

Indeed, without removal protections, many of the other features of these agencies’ structures risk losing their force. Bipartisan-appointment requirements can easily be evaded simply by firing all Commissioners of the opposite party. Just look at the FTC today. Lengthy fixed terms can also be cut short at the President’s will. With the most extreme exercises of at-will removal, the multimember structure itself could be eliminated, by executive fiat, with sufficient arbitrary firings to winnow a commission down to a sole remaining chair. Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable Government. In rejecting that project, the Court creates an Executive Branch that Congress never dreamed of establishing and that it now has little hope of ever reining in.

[Part III–B–2 — the Federal Reserve carve-out. This is the dissent’s answer to Part III–B of the Court’s opinion, the Part Justice Thomas did not join.]

Perhaps most strikingly, the Court today also makes clear that, whatever the logic of its decision, there are some ad hoc historical exceptions to its totalizing view of Article II, at least for the Federal Reserve. For most agencies, the majority here says, removal protections like the FTC’s make the President’s job ” ‘impossible’ ” and so are unlawful. For agencies that follow in the “lineage” of the First and Second Banks of the United States, however, the Court recognizes that the Founders were acutely aware “of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy” and that they therefore “guaranteed [such agencies] independence from Presidential control.” As a result, the Court holds, removal protections remain permissible (perhaps even indispensable) for agencies, including the Federal Reserve, that follow in “this tradition.”

As discussed above, this is all partly right. Yes, the Founders did “kn[ow] from experience” that some Government functions “should not be subject to political interference.” Yes, this tradition need not remain ” ‘trapped in amber’ ” while Congress continues to devise new agencies and structures to “manag[e] a vastly more complex economy in a vastly more complex world.” What is unclear is why these principles should be limited only to agencies, like the Federal Reserve, that in some respects influence “monetary policy.”

Even assuming the majority is right that the Federal Reserve’s historical pedigree gives it a special place in the constitutional structure, that just leaves the majority with yet additional workability problems. How close is close enough for a historical analogue of this kind? Does any agency that “influence[s] monetary policy” qualify? Is it relevant that the modern agency, like the Bank of the United States, is “quasi-private”? What happens if Congress adds new functions beyond the historical baseline? In short: When, exactly is our law ” ‘trapped in amber,’ ” and when is it not?

These line-drawing problems are the inevitable result of the majority’s ruling, yet never arose under Humphrey’s. Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions. The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.

[Part III–C — the dissent’s direct answer on Morrison and Seila Law, to be set against the Court’s Part II–B–2–b above.]

Finally, the majority suggests that Humphrey’s has been “undermined” by later cases. That is incorrect. Morrison did not ” ‘repudiat[e]’ ” Humphrey’s. It extended its holding to uphold removal protections for a distinct, inferior officer. The case that Morrison repudiated was Myers. In Free Enterprise Fund, the Court accepted the lawfulness of “one level of good-cause protection” for the SEC. Although Seila Law criticized Humphrey’s at times, its conclusion was simply that Humphrey’s could not resolve the distinct question at issue. Each of these cases left Humphrey’s firmly in place, until today.

[The dissent also faults the majority for refusing to say where its theory ends — for suggesting that non-Article III adjudicators “might yet survive” without explaining why, and for saying nothing about inferior officers and the civil service, where the Government “has the candor not to deny that the ‘logic’ of its position ‘extends to inferior officers.’ ”]

[Part IV.]

The majority’s decision is egregiously wrong. The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time. That decision does not just overrule precedent; it all but ignores that precedent exists. It does not just hamstring the political branches’ ability to respond to new challenges; it rewinds the clock nearly 150 years, holding that a common agency structure is, and always has been, forbidden.

Will the resulting transformations yield the benefits, sounding in responsiveness and accountability, that the majority touts? Or will they risk placing “in the hands of a bold and designing man, of high ambition, … an instrument of the worst oppression,” which will “sacrific[e] every principle of independence to the will of the [President]”? Neither I, nor the majority, knows with certainty. That is exactly why the Constitution leaves decisions like this one, involving sensitive tradeoffs and difficult judgment calls, to those best positioned to make them, and then to be held accountable for doing so: the political branches.

Today, the Court discards that democratic regime in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control. The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him. In granting the President this unbridled authority, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty. I respectfully dissent.

Notes & Questions

A note on reading a case this new. This was decided on June 29, 2026, eight weeks before this course began. There is no bound volume, no settled page numbers, almost no scholarship, and no line of lower-court decisions applying it. You are reading it the way the profession is reading it — cold. That is uncomfortable and it is also the most realistic exercise in this book. Every case in this module was once eight weeks old. Notice, as you go, how much of what you normally rely on is actually secondary commentary telling you what a case means, and how differently you read when that scaffolding is absent.

1. Big picture — the module’s last case undoes its first. Humphrey’s Executor held in 1935 that Congress may protect the members of a body exercising quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions from at-will removal. That decision built the independent agency, and every case you have read in this module has been an argument about it: Morrison abandoned its vocabulary while expanding its result, Seila Law reduced it to one of two narrow exceptions and described it as a decision about the 1935 Federal Trade Commission specifically. Slaughter finishes the job. The rule is now that for-cause removal protection for the heads of agencies exercising executive power is unconstitutional, and the reasoning is that the Humphrey’s Executor categories were never real — that an agency enforcing a congressional mandate against private parties exercises executive power whatever adjectives are attached to it. The Chief Justice’s formulation is memorable and worth being able to quote: no ifs, ands, or quasis. Two things to hold as you read. First, the case is the culmination of a formalist arc that began, in this module, with Chadha and Scalia’s Morrison dissent — a lone dissent from 1988 is now, in substance, the law. Second, the decision is not clean. It carves out the Federal Reserve, and one Justice in the majority refused to join that carve-out. A rule with exactly one exception, and a member of the majority who will not sign it, is a rule that will be litigated hard. That is where note 5 goes.

2. Raw specific knowledge — the holding, the parts, and the joinder that matters. (a) State the holding in one sentence, and state what it overrules. (b) Learn the line-up, which is not what most of the commentary reported. Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion, joined by Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, JJ., and by Thomas, J., as to all but Part III–B; Gorsuch, J., concurring; Sotomayor, J., dissenting, joined by Kagan and Jackson, JJ. No numerical tally is printed, which is why this reading, like Butler and Lucas and Morrison, carries no vote field. If you have read a summary saying that Thomas and Barrett wrote separately here, that summary was describing the companion case; several widely-circulated accounts got this wrong, and it is a good early lesson in reading the opinion rather than the account of it. (c) Part III–B is the Federal Reserve carve-out and it is the part Thomas would not join. Be able to say what it holds and what it says grounds it — history and tradition, and the lineage running back to the First and Second Banks of the United States. (d) Note precisely what happened to the other two cases in this module. Seila Law is treated as controlling and is extended. Morrison is not overruled — it is enlisted, on the ground that it had already called the FTC’s powers executive and already rejected rigid categories, at least as to inferior officers. A case can be cited approvingly by the decision that guts its premises, and you should be able to explain how that is possible here. (e) Citation convention: no page cites in the body, because there is no reporter pagination yet. Cite by opinion and part.

3. Practical application — run the whole federal government through the rule. For each, say whether its head may now be removed at will, which part of the opinion decides it, and how confident you are: (a) the Federal Trade Commission; (b) the Securities and Exchange Commission; (c) the National Labor Relations Board; (d) the Federal Communications Commission; (e) the Federal Election Commission, whose bipartisan composition is the entire point of its design; (f) an administrative law judge inside the SEC who decides individual enforcement cases; (g) the Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates the removal of civil servants; (h) a Governor of the Federal Reserve; (i) the Federal Open Market Committee’s regional bank presidents, who are not presidentially appointed at all; (j) the Comptroller General, who is removable by Congress — recall Bowsher, a note in this module. You will find that (f), (g), (i) and (j) are genuinely hard, and you should be able to say why each is hard rather than just flagging it. Then the drafting exercise: Congress wants an agency that adjudicates disputes between private parties fairly and is not subject to White House direction in individual cases. Draft the structure. You may not use for-cause removal of the agency head. If you conclude the goal is now unattainable by statute, say so and say what that means for the adjudication of, for example, immigration cases or veterans’ benefits.

4. Attack the reasoning — Sotomayor’s dissent, and the problem of the single exception. (a) Reconstruct the dissent’s three moves: that the Constitution’s text says nothing about removal and the rule therefore rests on an inference from the Vesting Clause; that congressional practice of protecting officers runs back to the early Republic and has been long, varied and largely unchallenged; and that the majority has replaced a workable if imperfect framework with a categorical rule whose only limit is an exception the majority cannot justify on its own premises. Note that (b) is Frankfurter’s Youngstown gloss argument and Kagan’s Seila Law argument arriving for a third time in this module — and note that it keeps being made by whoever is defending the existing arrangement. Is that an objection to the argument or just an observation about who needs it? (b) The strongest form of the dissent’s third move is a logical one, and you should be able to state it as such. If the constitutional principle is that the President must be able to remove those who execute the law, then either the Federal Reserve executes the law — in which case the carve-out is unconstitutional — or it does not, in which case the majority owes an account of what it is doing that is not execution, which is precisely the kind of account Humphrey’s Executor offered and this opinion rejected as fiction. Justice Thomas appears to have found that argument unanswerable, which is why he did not join Part III–B. Construct the majority’s best response. It will have to run through the idea that history and tradition can establish a distinct constitutional settlement for a distinct institution, independent of functional categories — and you should then ask whether that is a principle or a description of an outcome the Court was unwilling to reach. (c) Read Gorsuch’s concurrence and say what it adds. A Justice who joins the majority in full and still writes separately is telling you something about what he thinks the opinion does not settle.

5. Creative thinking — what happens next, and what you would have written. (a) The first hard case. Suppose a President removes a Governor of the Federal Reserve, stating a policy disagreement about interest rates. Write the two-page argument for the Governor and the two-page argument for the President, using only this opinion. Then say who wins, and notice what your answer depends on: whether Part III–B states a rule with a boundary, or an unreasoned exception that a later Court can decline to extend. This is not a hypothetical, and the answer to it may be worth more to the world than anything else in this module. (b) Redraft the exception. If you think the Federal Reserve should be insulated, state the constitutional principle that insulates it — and then apply your principle honestly to the SEC and the NLRB. If it protects them too, you have written Humphrey’s Executor again. If it protects only the Fed, say exactly which feature does the work: monetary policy as a distinct historical tradition, the specific documented costs of politicized central banking, the absence of enforcement against private parties, or something else. One of those is a legal argument and the others are policy arguments in legal clothing. Identify which is which. (c) Then step back over the whole module. You have now watched a doctrine oscillate for a century: Myers, Humphrey’s Executor, Wiener, Bowsher, Morrison, Free Enterprise Fund, Seila Law, Collins, and this. Write one page arguing that the oscillation shows the Court has been searching for a rule the Constitution does not contain — that the trade between accountability and insulation is a political judgment the document leaves to Congress. Then write one page arguing the opposite: that the oscillation is the ordinary process of a structural principle being worked out against changing institutions, and that Slaughter is where it settles. Do not conclude that both are half right. Pick one and defend it, because in April you will be asked to.