In a 6-3 decision last week, the Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump direct control over almost all nominally independent federal agencies. The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter struck down a decades-old statute that prohibited presidents from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission without cause, holding that such restrictions violate the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. In so doing, the Republican majority imperiled dozens of similar statutes, and gifted presidents broad power to prevent federal agencies from doing the jobs Congress created them to do.
Congress established the FTC, for example, as a five-member bipartisan body responsible for protecting the public from corporate abuses. Since taking office, Trump has replaced the Democratic chair with a political ally and fired the two other Democratic members. Now, the FTC is a two-member MAGA body that is mostly responsible for rewarding Trump’s friends and punishing his enemies. According to the agency’s latest report, the FTC took action against only eight suspected violations of federal antitrust laws during Fiscal Year 2025—less than half as many as the preceding year.
Basically, the freedom to fire agency heads at will—and replace them with cronies or not at all—is the freedom to redirect or halt agencies’ work. It’s little wonder, then, that Trump praised Slaughter on social media as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”
The Supreme Court is well aware, however, that the president will not always be a Republican. And Slaughter is carefully written to preserve the Republican justices’ ability to throttle Democratic policies in the future, whether they come from Congress or the White House.
In his majority opinion in Slaughter, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that laws that prohibit presidents from firing agency heads for no reason do not “deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance,” and merely serve to make the agency more subject to the will of Congress. (Such legislative primacy, it appears, is a bad thing.) But Roberts concludes by emphasizing that the president is “not all powerful—not by any means.” And he cited a few cases over the past 160 years in which the Court struck down some executive action as evidence for the proposition that the Court might someday choose to do it again.
The upshot of Slaughter is that it leaves no room for Congress to act as a check on the president. At the same time, it reserves for the Court the authority to curb any use of presidential power that the Republican justices don’t like.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch picked up the baton from Roberts, and went on at length about the Court’s responsibility to ensure that both Congress and the president stay in their respective lanes. Gorsuch agreed with the majority in Slaughter that presidents must have direct control over executive agencies, but he also argued that agencies are currently wielding powers that don’t belong to them—specifically, the power to “make laws and decide disputes under them.” Gorsuch acknowledged that Congress may not have delegated so much power to independent agencies “had it known that the President would come to control them.” And he warned that combining “all powers” in one office is “exactly what those who framed our Constitution feared.”
Gorsuch’s solution to this problem of the Court’s making is simple: The Court should take away agencies’ authority to make and enforce regulations. In his concurrence, Gorsuch essentially argues that the president can be all-powerful over his domain, but that domain must be incredibly limited. He pointed approvingly to the so-called “major questions doctrine,” an interpretive principle the Court usually calls upon to block Democratic policymaking that it deems too significant to be legal, as a first step towards the paring-back that the Constitution purportedly requires. And he called on his colleagues to “finish the journey we start today” and “restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong.”
Gorsuch contended that presidents’ veto power and the higher congressional vote threshold for overriding a veto make it nigh impossible for Congress to retrieve powers it delegates to the president, so any “real response” to legislative delegations of authority to the executive branch “will have to come from this Court.” Right-wing activists have already picked up on Gorsuch’s signal and are planning the next phase of their litigation against the government’s capacity to serve the public.
Slaughter expands the president’s control over executive agencies, but it lays the foundation to further shrink those agencies’ ability to actually do anything that conflicts with the Court’s own policy agenda. Reading the majority and concurring opinions in Slaughter together reveals that the Republican justices did not transfer a bunch of Congress’s power to the president. They took a massive amount of power for themselves, and deigned to share some of that power with Trump.
