Campaign Legal Center’s Trevor Potter Responds to U.S. Supreme Court’s Ruling on Independent Agencies
WASHINGTON — Today, in a 6-3 opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a huge blow to the rule of law and our democracy. By expanding the president’s control over agencies that Congress created to be independent, and expanding the president’s ability to manipulate them in service of a political agenda, the Roberts Court is paving the way for extreme abuses of power. This Court has yet again tossed aside decades of precedent, practice, and the Constitution itself in favor of greenlighting executive overreach.
Congress created independent agencies to be independent from the president on purpose, recognizing that the expertise and functions of independent agencies would be threatened if the president could dictate how these agencies interpreted and enforced federal law. Agency independence is essential to ensuring public trust in our government and, indeed, furthers foundational principles of democratic accountability.
Trevor Potter, president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, issued the following statement:
“Over the course of more than a century, independent agencies have become an integral part of our representative system of government. Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on the constitutional authority of Congress to establish such independent agencies and thus on our system of checks and balances.
“For decades, Congress has used its legislative authority to create agencies that operate free from direct control of the president so they cannot be influenced by political interests. Removal protections were intended to be a key guardrail for this separation of power — even though the president nominates agency leadership, agency commissioners must then be confirmed by the Senate, and a president may not unfairly punish those leaders for exercising their independent judgment to advance the interests of the American people.
“Today, the Supreme Court removed that guardrail and gave the president broad power to fire the heads of agencies that were intended by Congress to be insulated from the president’s control.
“Independent agencies have a duty to advance the interests of the American people — regardless of the president's will and partisan preferences. The public has a right to a government staffed and led by public officials who try to ensure the government works to advance the public good in accordance with laws passed by Congress, not the political agenda of whoever is in the Oval Office.”
Background:
In March 2025, President Trump unlawfully removed Democratic Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter from her position, despite protections that ensure the president — who appoints agency leadership — cannot remove them without sufficient cause. Slaughter sued to challenge her removal.
The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Campaign Legal Center filed an amicus brief in this case.
In today’s ruling, the Supreme Court reversed decades of legal precedent by allowing President Trump’s removal of Slaughter to stand and striking down statutory removal protections for the heads of independent agencies. The decision overturns the Court’s 1935 landmark decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and vastly expands the power handed to the president to control the agencies that regulate, oversee and ensure the functions of government serve the public.
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