Rebecca Slaughter found out in March 2025 that she no longer had a job at the Federal Trade Commission. The notice came by email, sent on President Donald Trump’s behalf. So did the one to fellow commissioner Alvaro Bedoya. Neither message said they had been fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” the only grounds federal law allows.
On Monday, September 22, 2025, the Supreme Court let the firing stand while it takes up her case. In a short, unsigned order, the justices paused a lower-court ruling that had put Slaughter back in office, and agreed to decide whether a president can remove the heads of independent agencies at will.
The path to the Supreme Court
Slaughter, nominated to the FTC by Trump in 2018 and renominated by President Joe Biden in 2023 for a term due to end in 2029, sued in federal court in Washington. Judge Loren AliKhan ordered her reinstated, relying on the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that Congress may create independent multi-member agencies, the FTC in that case, whose commissioners can be removed only for cause. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit left the order in place. Judges Patricia Millett and Nina Pillard called Humphrey’s Executor “controlling and directly on point.”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court on September 4 to pause AliKhan’s order and to hear the case without waiting for the appeals court. Chief Justice John Roberts froze the order temporarily four days later. Slaughter agreed in her September 15 filing that the court should take the case now, though she argued Humphrey’s Executor still protects her.
What the court will decide
The justices told the parties to address two questions. First, whether the removal protections for FTC commissioners violate the Constitution’s division of powers among the branches and, if so, whether Humphrey’s Executor should be overruled. Second, whether federal courts can order a wrongly removed official back to work. Arguments are set for the December session, which runs from December 1 to 10.
Justice Elena Kagan dissented from the pause, in a two-paragraph opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that the majority had let Trump remove “any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all,” and could thereby “extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.” Under Humphrey’s, she said, the president cannot fire an FTC commissioner without a reason. “Our emergency docket,” she wrote, “should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars.”
Earlier firings
Slaughter’s case followed two others. Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, both Democratic appointees, had also been removed and had won orders letting them stay on while they sued. On May 22, over the dissent of the court’s three Democratic appointees, the Supreme Court blocked those orders. The majority wrote then that the government was likely to show both boards “exercise considerable executive power.”
Lawyers for Harris and Wilcox asked the court to hear their cases alongside Slaughter’s. It declined, without explanation, and their cases continue in the lower courts.
