A U.S. district judge in the District of Columbia held on July 17 that President Trump did not have statutory authority to remove FTC commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause. Judge Loren AliKhan held that President Trump’s “at-will” removal of Slaughter was unlawful and granted a permanent injunction requiring the Trump administration to permit her return to the office without interference. The court relied on the unanimous 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which upheld Congress’s statutory limitation of a president’s removal authority for officials in certain independent agencies, like the FTC, for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—or, in other words, only “for cause.”
Under the FTC Act, the FTC is supposed to be led by five commissioners, with no more than three being from the same political party. The chair is appointed by the president. In March 2025, President Trump fired Commissioners Slaughter and Alvaro Badoya, the two Democrats on the Commission, leaving the Commission at the time with just two Republicans and no Democrats. President Trump added a third Republican, Mark Meador, to the Commission in April 2025. Since the FTC Act allows for removal of the Commissioners only “for cause,” however, Slaughter and Bedoya challenged their dismissal in federal court.
Judge AliKhan dismissed Bedoya’s suit as moot because he had resigned as FTC commissioner and lacked standing. Slaughter, however, prevailed, because the facts in her case “almost identically mirror those of Humphrey’s Executor.” Judge AliKhan explained that “‘it is [the Supreme] Court’s prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents[,]’” despite being asked to do so by the Trump administration. She also tackled the issue presented by the Supreme Court’s decision in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the Court declined to extend Humphrey’s Executor to single-director agencies, like the CFPB. She observed that the Court therein also reaffirmed its holding in the 1935 decision with respect to “multimember expert agencies that do not wield substantial executive power.” Similarly, she also noted that other courts have refused to overrule Humphrey’s Executor since Seila Law, including in Wilcox v. Trump, where a U.S. district judge in DC blocked President Trump’s effort to remove at will a member of the NLRB, and in Harris v. Bessent, where a different judge in DC federal court blocked President Trump’s attempt to remove a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board. Both Wilcox and Harris relied on the enduring vitality of Humphrey’s Executor.
There is no doubt that the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word on this topic. Indeed, the Wilcox and Harris cases already have made their way to the Court, which on May 22 granted the administration’s requests for stays of the district courts’ decisions.
As Judge AliKhan described it, the administration asked her “to read the tea leaves of Wilcox and Harris as further support for their position that [she] can and should jettison Humphrey’s Executor.” She was not convinced. She held that even if the Supreme Court were to approve of President Trump’s “at-will” removal of both Wilcox and Harris, “any suggestion that Humphrey’s Executor may not extend to other agencies cannot be read as an invitation to sidestep its application to the FTC.”
It is safe to assume that the Trump administration will seek a stay of this order, just as it did in Wilcox and Harris. Indeed, in June 2025 another federal court in the District of Maryland—in Boyle v. Trump—rejected President Trump’s at-will removal of several members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. A stay request to the Supreme Court in that case is awaiting decision.