Out: Deepstate. In: Spoils System-SCOTUS Resets Federal Government to 1913

The most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 17

A-breakin' rocks in the hot sun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won

Breaking News, June 29, 2026

Presidents can fire employees at quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the US Supreme Court ruled this morning.

The most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades effectively turns members of such agencies into at-will employees. In a separate case, the Justices carved out an exception for members of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Board of Governors.

For almost a century presidents have only been able to fire members of the FTC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board for cause: inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Presidents were so limited by the 1935 Humphrey's Executor v. United States Supreme Court decision.

Every president since has chafed at the ensuing result where the elected leader of the Executive Branch has to put up with agencies led by the appointees of previous presidents — even political opponents.

No more. Independent agencies were part of an effort at the start of the 20th century to replace the spoils system, where winning candidates would enter the White House and replace everyone with supporters and cronies.

Which it did. But it also followed Feola’s Iron Law of Solution Shenanigans: The solution to one problem creates opportunities quickly found and exploited by hustlers, creating dozens of new predicaments.

It’s instructive to look at the political bookends here: in 1935 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt could not fire a Republican FTC commissioner. Today the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Republican Donald Trump could fire a Democratic FTC commissioner.

FDR entered the White House in 1933 and set about creating the New Deal, only to often find himself stymied by the FTC in general and one commissioner in particular, conservative Republican William E. Humphrey. FDR sent Humphrey a letter telling the commissioner to resign. Humphrey refused, citing the 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act, which established the agency and said presidents could only fire commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

So FDR sent him a second letter: You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence. FDR fired Humphrey in October 1933 and stopped paying his salary.

Humphrey kept going to work anyway for five months; then he died. The executor of his estate sued the government for back pay. That case worked its way all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that presidents were forbidden from such firings.

It’s clear Trump deliberately set out to overturn Humphrey’s Executor. He fired Democratic FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter outright, and gave no statutory justification for the termination. The FTC has Democrat and Republican seats.

A valid justification might have allowed Humphrey’s to limp along. Slaughter’s termination presented the Court the same stark choice it had faced in 1935; either the president is the chief executive and can fire anyone in the executive branch they please, or not.

Today the Court changed its mind and said Trump and FDR were right: To ‘discharg[e] the duties of his trust,’ the President 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.

If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it.

Presidents can now fire anyone in the Executive Branch and replace them with supporters; that’s pretty much the definition of a spoils system.

Am I overreacting? Is this the most consequential Supreme Court Decision in decades? Let’s see what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has to say in dissent: the ruling gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws. (It) reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.

Sotomayor was so mad she read her dissent from the bench. Sounds terrible!

It isn’t. Or, more exactly, it isn’t any better or worse than Humphrey’s Executor, which started by awarding a dead guy five months’ back pay and ended by creating our infamously sclerotic bureaucracy.

Feola’s Iron Law of Solution Shenanigans says the Slaughter decision will break up the bureaucratic sclerosis and allow the formation of exciting new preposterous predicaments…

Say, how much do you think an FTC Commissioner seat will go for on eBay?