Can the President Fire Anyone He Wants?

GrantPower Check, welcome back. Grant here.

MayaAnd I'm Maya.

Speaker 3Okay, so we picked a week.

GrantWe really did.

Speaker 3The Supreme Court is sitting on what might be the biggest separation of powers ruling in decades, and the clock is running out on this term.

GrantRight; so the case is Trump v. Slaughter, and ABC News is reporting the court looks likely to side with Trump, which would effectively end the independence of bipartisan agencies. Full stop.

Speaker 3The whole structure, not just the FTC.

GrantThat's the part that got me. We're talking the NLRB, the EEOC, the SEC, agencies that have operated at arm's length from the White House for decades.

Speaker 3And potentially the Federal Reserve-that one has its own case, Trump vs. Cook, running in parallel.

GrantYeah, yeah, the Fed question is its own animal, and we'll get into exactly why.

Speaker 3And, plot twist, the court actually tipped its hand back in September before a single word of the opinion was written.

GrantA stay order that told you everything you needed to know.

Speaker 3Exactly; so today we're tracing this from the nineteen thirty five Humphreys Executor decision all the way through oral argument last December: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh-the actual quotes

Speaker 4Yes.

Speaker 3from that room are something.

GrantAnd then we assess whether anything in the current oversight system can hold once the structural insulation is gone. That's the check or no check question at the end. And Maya and I land in pretty different places on it.

Speaker 3We do.

GrantA ruling could drop any day now. Code open starts right here. Sure pass!

Speaker 3March eighteenth twenty twenty five, Rebecca Slaughter, sitting FTC commissioner, term running through twenty twenty nine, gets an email, and the key line reads, "Her continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with this Administration's priorities." That's it. No misconduct, no neglect, just "bye.

GrantAnd here's what makes that so striking: the FTC Act has been on the books from nineteen fourteen—one hundred eleven years. It says commissioners can

Speaker 5only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

GrantErrors can only be removed for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance; Trump didn't claim any of those, not even close.

Speaker 3He didn't even try to check those boxes.

GrantTrump invoked Article II, the constitutional authority of the presidency, full stop.

Speaker 3OK, so get this. SCOTUSblog reported that Trump originally nominated Slaughter back in 2018. He fired someone he put there himself.

GrantThe math on that doesn't quite work for the bad actor framing, does it?

Speaker 3Not even a little. And she's not alone, by the way-he fired another Democratic commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, the same day.

GrantRight. Two commissioners, two emails, zero stated clause, and both of them sued.

Speaker 3They did. And this is the part that should stop people cold: two separate courts ruled the firings illegal. A federal district judge in July said Trump's removal

Speaker 5of Cordray was illegal.

Speaker 3Its removal was unlawful and without legal effect the DC Circuit agreed two to one.

Granttwo courts, two rulings illegal.

Speaker 3And then?

GrantChief Justice Roberts issues a stay, Slaughter out anyway while the case climbs to the Supreme Court. ABC News reported the court now looks likely to side with Trump, potentially rolling back ninety years of precedent.

Speaker 3Ninety years?

GrantYeah, and the ruling's expected before end of June, so we're basically watching

Speaker 5the end of the world.

GrantWatching it happen in real time.

Speaker 3You know what gets me? It's not just the firing, it's that the system, the courts, the statute, all said no, and she still lost her seat while the legal fight played out.

GrantThat's the thing about a stay: the president acts, the lower courts push back, and then the Supreme Court essentially says, "hold on, we'll sort this out." Except holding on means the firing stands in the meantime.

Speaker 3So the law said he couldn't do it, two judges agreed. And he did it anyway.

GrantWhich raises the obvious question, what exactly was supposed to stop this, what legal architecture was Congress counting on when they wrote that nineteen fourteen statute? Because clearly something broke down.

Speaker 3Or overruled and the answer to that goes back a long way.

GrantSo the legal wall that was supposed to stop this, it's 91 years old. And the crazy part, it started at the exact same agency.

Speaker 3Same agency, same fight. Nineteen thirty three FDR fires an FTC commissioner named William Humphrey. No misconduct, no neglect, just "our policy views don't line up.

GrantSound familiar? A little! FDR literally wrote Humphrey a letter saying, "I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together. Humphrey said, "No, thanks." Roosevelt fired him anyway.

Speaker 3Okay, okay, okay. So the FTC Act already said commissioners could only be removed for inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance. FDR just ignored that.

GrantCompletely, and a Supreme Court unanimously nine to zero said Congress gets to design agencies that way. The logic was that the FTC wasn't exercising pure executive power. It was acting more like quasi legislative. quasi judicial; expert commissioners; bipartisan; staggered terms,--Congress wanted it insulated from whoever won the last election.

Speaker 6Mm hmm.

Speaker 3Right, and that framework became the legal foundation for roughly two dozen independent agencies that exist today-the NLRB, the SEC, the FEC-all built on that same logic.

GrantYour retirement savings run through agencies protected by Humphrey's Executor-the labor rights in your employment contract. Same thing.

Speaker 3Oh, that hits different when you say it like that. This is an abstract constitutional theory; it's the structure behind agencies that actually regulate your job and your money.

GrantExactly; which is why Seila Law in twenty twenty was such a signal: the Roberts Court struck down removal protections for the CFPB's single director. The majority recast Humphrey's as a narrow exception, not a broad green light for agency independence.

Speaker 3Wait, so five years before Slaughter was ever fired, the court was already shrinking the space that protects agencies like the FTC?

GrantThe Roberts Court explicitly said, look at what the actual agency does, not just the label on the door. And SCOTUSblog flagged something interesting in Slaughter's explainer: Roberts himself raised a footnote question in Scalia law asking whether the nineteen thirty five FTC's powers were even accurately described in that original ruling. Wow!

Speaker 3Hmm, so the ground work was already being laid.

Grantmade.

MayaThe case against Humphrey's Executor wasn't born in 2025. The court spent years narrowing it before anyone made the move this administration made.

GrantAnd now it goes from doctrine on paper to six justices in a room. The oral argument is where this either survives or gets dismantled out loud.

MayaThat's the room we're walking into next. Okay, so the December eighth oral argument, wild from the first minute.

GrantThe quotes coming out of that room did the work for us.

MayaRoberts opened things up by calling Humphrey's Executor-and I'm going to read this exactly-"a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.

GrantThat's a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, on the record-not exactly a signal he's inclined to preserve it.

MayaTo be fair, Roberts has a point embedded in there. His argument is that the nineteen thirty five FTC had almost no executive power. It was basically an investigative body. The modern FTC sets policy, brings enforcement, issues rules-that's a genuinely different animal.

GrantI hear the logic. But Sotomayor went straight at Solicitor General Sauer. Bauer with something that stopped the room. She said, You're asking us to destroy the structure of government.

MayaAnd Kagan backed that up. She flagged that a ruling for Trump puts massive, unchecked, uncontrolled power in the executive branch.

Speaker 3Wow.

MayaThose two weren't wrong on the stakes.

GrantNeither were wrong, and yet the stay tells you everything. The Supreme Court granted it back in September 2025, before the oral argument. before any ruling, meaning Slaughter was already out the door while the case was still live.

MayaThat's the part I keep coming back to. Two courts said the firing was illegal. Roberts issues a stay. The full court follows. So the stay mechanism itself functioned as the outcome before the opinion was even written.

GrantRight, and that's not nothing, institutionally speaking. So then there's Kavanaugh, and this is where it gets genuinely complicated.

MayaHe's the swing on scope, not on the core ruling.

GrantExactly; he told Sauer directly: I share concerns about what your position does to the Federal Reserve." The Solicitor General's response was basically, "The Fed is sui generis, a one of a kind institution with a separate historical tradition.

MayaWhich is an argument, not an answer. Kavanaugh was clearly not satisfied; he pressed the point on how you draw that line with any precision.

GrantAnd that's the thread hanging out here, Grant-because it's not just the Fed, it's which agencies fall inside the new rule and which ones get carved out.

MayaSadly the FTC, the NLRB, the EEOC, all of them are in different structural positions. The Fed question is actually being argued in a separate linked case called Trump versus Cook.

GrantSo the court is running two removal cases simultaneously?

MayaIn parallel. And whether they carve out the Fed and how, probably shapes the scope of everything else.

GrantThat map of which agencies survive and which don't-that's where we go next. So we've mapped the legal architecture, now let's talk about what actually breaks. Ward and Smith identified the agencies directly in the crosshairs: the NLRB, EEOC, FERC, SEC and FTC, five agencies that regulate your job, your energy bill, your retirement account.

MayaAnd the staggered terms at all of them exist for a reason. FERC commissioners serve five-year terms, no more than three from one party. Barry, that's not bureaucratic tidiness. That's institutional memory deliberately designed to outlast any single administration.

GrantOkay, so get this. Imagine you file an NLRB complaint today. Your case is moving. Then the board's members get swapped because the White House changed. Does your case survive? Does anybody at the agency even remember why it mattered?

MayaThe math on that is not great for the worker.

GrantHmm.

MayaAnd I get the accountability argument. Voters elect a president, the president should steer policy. That's not wrong on its face.

GrantHmm.

MayaBut what we're describing isn't accountability through elections, it's personnel turnover as policy. Those are very different things.

GrantRight, right. Now, the Fed, because Kavanaugh basically drew a hard line there, and it's a separate case entirely.

MayaTrump versus Cook. Trump tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in August 2025, citing mortgage fraud. Mortgage fraud allegations she flatly denied, SCOTUSblog reported the January oral argument showed all nine justices skeptical,

GrantWow.

Mayaincluding conservatives.

GrantAll nine?

MayaKavanaugh told Solicitor General Sauer directly, quote, that would weaken if not shatter the independence of the Federal Reserve. And then he went further, what goes around comes around. A future Democratic president removes every Trump Fed appointee on day one.

GrantYeah! Kavanaugh doing the political math out loud in open court.

MayaHistory's a pretty good guide," was his actual line, and Jerome Powell was sitting in the chamber listening to all of it.

GrantThat is a lot of pressure to sit through.

MayaAnd slightly.

GrantSo Slaughter opens the door wide for these agencies; but the court carves out the Fed as something structurally distinct. Its own historical tradition going back to nineteen thirteen, the court has already said so in writing.

MayaAnd no president before Trump had even tried to fire a Fed governor, not one. Slaughter's lawyer made that point directly, from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden, an unbroken line.

GrantThat context lands differently when you hear it out loud. Switching gears, because this ruling doesn't land alone. Loper Light in 2024 already stripped away court deference to agencies' own legal interpretations. Now Slaughter strips the personnel protection.

Speaker 4protection. Two hits from two directions.

MayaThat's the cumulative squeeze. Agencies lose the legal shield on one side, lose the leadership stability on the other. Congress can still build these agencies, but can they actually run independently? That's the question we're sitting with. So, 'Loper Light' last year. Courts no longer defer to agencies on legal interpretation. Now Slaughter removes the personnel protection. Two hits,

Speaker 6Wow.

Mayasame target.

GrantThink of it as a pincer: pre-Loper light, an agency could write a rule, a court would challenge it, and the agency's reading of the statute got the benefit of the doubt. That presumption is gone. Courts call the shots on what the law means.

MayaAnd now, if a president disagrees with the direction a commissioner is taking, he can just swap them out.

GrantRight, so you've lost the deference shield on the rules side. side, and the 10 year protection on the people side, simultaneously. Okay, so get this: Congress techn Technically, Congress creates these agencies; Congress sets their mandates.

MayaAbsolutely, the statutory authority doesn't disappear.

GrantBut does that actually mean anything if the White House controls who runs them day to day?

MayaThat's the real question. ABC News put it plainly. The case could effectively end the independence of roughly 20 dozen bipartisan agencies Congress designed to be insulated from presidential pressure. You can write the mandate in law, you can't insulate the person executing it anymore.

GrantSo the accountability argument shifts. Supporters of this ruling say voters elect the president, president controls the agencies, that's democratic accountability.

MayaAnd the counter is that the whole point of an independent NLRB or FERC was to separate technical regulatory judgment from election cycles; you wanted experience to outlast administrations.

GrantNeither side is wrong; that's what makes it a genuine structural fight, not a partisan one.

MayaYeah, I don't think anyone's purely the hero here.

GrantNo; so Congress can still act, courts can still review. But when the opinion lands, watch the scope. Narrow means FTC commissioners specifically. Broad means...

MayaHumphrey's Executor's gone; every independent agency flips.

GrantAnd that gap? That's exactly where we're taking this next.

MayaAll right. Check or no check, that's what we're here to settle.

GrantOr not settle, which honestly might be the more honest answer.

MayaFair. So my read, the structural check isn't gone. Congress can still write new removal protections. Courts can still review whether a for-cause determination is actually valid. Future presidents inherit the same tool. The mechanism shifted toward the elected branch, but it didn't disappear.

GrantOkay, but Grant, what Check exactly? The Check was the installation, the Ninety years of accumulated independence that agencies built on top of Humphreys. You can't legislate that back overnight.

MayaThat's a real tension, yeah.

GrantIf the court removes the structural protection, there's no after-the-fact congressional fix that restores what the NLRB or the EEOC spent decades building. The Check. In this case was the precedent itself.

MayaWhich brings us to the thing listeners should actually watch for when the opinion drops and ABC News flag this, too: Scope.

GrantScope right.

MayaNarrow ruling: FTC Commissioners exercise executive power, therefore removable at will. That's a surgical cut. Broad ruling: Humphreys is fully overruled and every independent agency is on the table. Those are not the same world.

GrantThose are really not the same world; and at argument Alito was actually asking Solicitor General Sauer how you even craft a ruling that reserves judgment on agencies that might not come before the court for years.

MayaWhich tells you the court is at least aware it's holding a live wire.

GrantRight. Aware of it maybe. Gripping it anyway.

MayaYeah, so check or no check?

GrantMy verdict: partial check at best. The tools exist on paper. But removing the structural insulation and calling that accountability assumes the next Congress is motivated to restore independence. That's a political bet, not a constitutional guarantee.

MayaMine is, "check is strained but intact, if the ruling stays narrow." A broad opinion and we're in genuinely new territory for two dozen agencies.

GrantSo watch the scope when it lands-that's the actual verdict.

MayaCould be any day now, given the term ends around July. All right, that's a wrap on this one. And honestly, the moment that stuck with me was Maya reading that firing email, inconsistent with administration priorities. Four words that put ninety years of legal architecture on trial.

GrantAnd what I keep coming back to is the retirement savings point. Your NLRB, your EEOC, your FTC, these aren't abstractions. They're the infrastructure behind real paychecks and real protections.

MayaThe core question this episode kept circling is when the structural insulation is gone, what's left? I said maybe a narrow ruling holds something together. Maya's not sure the math works that way.

GrantJury's still out on that one. Literally. We expect the ruling before end of June.

MayaIf this episode helped something click for you, share it with one person who cares. Follow us wherever you listen. Drop a review. It genuinely helps others find the show.

GrantThanks for being here. We'll see you next week on Power Check.