The Supreme Court Just Told the FTC It Serves the President, Not the Law
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter that the President can remove a Federal Trade Commissioner at will — no cause required, no statutory process, no independence. The decision overturns Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a precedent that had stood for eighty-nine years.
Walk the timeline, because the timeline is the point. In March 2025, Trump removed Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, citing only that her service was "inconsistent" with his administration's policies. He fired Alvaro Bedoya the same way. Both were Democratic appointees. Both had for-cause removal protection under the FTC Act — the same statutory protection that survived a direct challenge in 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt tried to fire Commissioner William Humphrey for the identical reason: political disagreement. The Court told Roosevelt no. This time, it told Trump yes.
That reversal isn't a technicality. For-cause removal protection is the entire mechanism that lets an agency like the FTC bring an enforcement action this year and expect it to still mean something under a different administration next year. Strip the protection and every open case, every consent order, every ongoing investigation becomes contingent on one thing: whether the commissioners who approved it are still in their seats.
Look at what's sitting on the FTC's desk right now while this ruling lands. RentGrow paid $2.25 million on July 9 for reporting duplicate criminal and eviction records. Amazon paid $2.25 million on June 30 for stonewalling identity theft victims' record requests. Illuminate Education's student-data-security order got final approval June 5. Chairman Andrew Ferguson told reporters the agency is "poised for a surge" in privacy enforcement for the second half of 2026. Every one of those actions, and everything Ferguson is promising, now rests on commissioners the President can remove the moment their votes stop lining up with his priorities — his, not the statute's, not the agency's, not the public's.
The Court carved out one exception the same term: Trump v. Cook preserved removal protection for Federal Reserve governors. That's not principle, that's selection. If independence mattered as a structural safeguard, it would have mattered for the FTC too. It only survived where it was convenient to preserve it.
The FTC isn't the only casualty. NLRB, FERC, and every other multimember independent agency built on the same for-cause removal structure just lost the same protection, in one ruling, without a single one of them being named as a party.
Ferguson can promise a surge in enforcement all he wants. The promise is only as good as his job security, and his job security is now a phone call away from ending. That's not a hypothetical for the next administration to worry about. That's the operating condition for every privacy case the FTC brings starting today.