For more than 40 years, since his service as a young Reagan administration lawyer, Chief Justice John Roberts has pressed for an exceptionally powerful US president, one who could fire the heads of independent agencies at any time.
In one memo to the White House counsel in 1983, Roberts asserted, “the time is ripe to reconsider the constitutional anomaly of independent agencies.”
When he was appointed chief justice in 2005, he began laying the groundwork to reverse Supreme Court precedent that permitted Congress to limit the president’s firing power.
“Without such power,” Roberts wrote in a 2010 case, “the President could not be held fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities; the buck would stop somewhere else.”
Roberts’ effort climaxed on Monday as he led a majority to reverse a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that had allowed Congress to restrict the president’s authority to fire agency heads to ensure their independence. From his seat at the center of the elevated bench, the chief justice observed that the court had been steadily backing away from the 1935 precedent, which he insisted conflicted with constitutional history and structure.
“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” he declared.
Controversy over the regulatory sphere can seem dry, compared to Supreme Court battles centered on the Second Amendment, abortion and reproductive rights, religion, and immigration. But the work of US independent agencies cuts a swath across American life, for better or worse, imposing requirements on businesses and individuals in areas of public health and safety, consumer protection, with the goal of enhancing the common good.
“Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President,” Roberts wrote, expanding on his position in his 36-page opinion. “That President is not all powerful – not by any means. But he is not impotent either. He and he alone is vested with ‘the executive Power’ of the United States.”
Roberts’ sweeping approach to presidential power has manifested itself in multiple cases over the years, perhaps most notably in 2024 when the chief justice and fellow conservatives gave Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution, pointing to the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority.
His long-game effort to curtail independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, at the center of the ruling Monday, is not unlike his successive moves curtailing the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That drive culminated earlier this term as the court rolled back federal protections for Black and Latino voters.
Roberts’ strategic patience paid off. In both, he was assisted by the additional appointments of likeminded conservative justices that created a 6-3 supermajority.
And in the same vein, the three liberal justices again were left only to dissent.
On Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered an oral dissent for the left-wing justices, emphasizing the importance of insulating independent regulators from the pressure of a president who may want to infringe on fair-trade regulations, such as overseen by the FTC, but also workplace safety, nuclear energy and chemical hazards that regulatory agencies manage.
Sotomayor said Congress had long relied on the 1935 precedent to set up a workable regulatory system of government.
“(T)he Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted,” Sotomayor wrote, “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.”
Congressional legislation establishing the Federal Trade Commission and other independent agencies dictates certain terms in office for commissioners and permits removal only for some wrongdoing, defined as “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
When Trump returned for his second term, he set out to remove Democratic-appointed commissioners at a number of agencies, including Rebecca Slaughter, who was in the middle of a seven-year term at the FTC. The commission was established in 1914 to protect consumers and safeguard against unfair business practices.
Slaughter received an email from Trump in March 2025 saying her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.”
Lower court judges sided with Slaughter as she tried to claim her post, based on 1935 precedent. As the Trump administration appealed, it lifted phrases from Roberts’ past decisions to argue that it was time to fully reverse the nine-decade decision.
Trump officials, along with Roberts and many fellow conservatives, subscribe to a “unitary executive theory” of presidential control that gives him power over the vast bureaucracy.
The justices did carve out an exception on Monday for the Federal Reserve, which Roberts said in the separate case of Trump v. Cook is based on the country’s long tradition of an independent central bank.
Slaughter, at a news conference after the court action, decried the decision against her and the Fed exception.
“Somehow Wall Street is special and gets special treatment, but other than that, the agencies that look out for everyday Americans do not,” Slaughter said.
After oral arguments in her case last December, and remarks from conservatives who hold the majority, it seemed inevitable that the Trump administration would prevail. And given Roberts’ history in transforming this area of the law, it appeared he would write the opinion himself.
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In the courtroom Monday, Roberts began by explaining that James Madison took the lead among America’s founders in conceiving of all executive power vested in the president, to appoint and oversee those who carry out the nation’s laws.
The chief justice portrayed Humphrey’s Executor as an outlier. The case began when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to fire an appointee of his predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, to the Federal Trade Commission. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the president lacked the power unless authorized by Congress.
That decision undermined an earlier ruling, the 1926 Myers v. United States, that had allowed the president to remove postmasters from office without congressional consent.
For as long as Roberts has worked in government, first for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and then as a jurist, he has put forth a robust concept of executive power. He has sought a return to the “seminal,” as he called it, Myers ruling.
On Monday, he highlighted his prior decisions, in 2010 and 2020, that lifted Congress’ restrictions on the president’s removal power and relied on the 1926 Myers case.
From the bench on Monday, he noted the Myers decision had been written by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who had earlier been president of the United States. Taft believed, Roberts recounted, that the vesting of the executive power in the president was essentially a grant of the power to execute the laws, which included the ability to remove officials over whom he lacks responsibility and control.
As Roberts inflated that 1926 ruling, Sotomayor diminished it.
“If Myers is the ‘best’ support for the majority’s position, its theory is a castle built on sand. For one thing, as the majority admits, Myers did not address for-cause removal protection; the challenged statute instead required Senate consent to removal.”
Her sharpest comments came as she scoffed at Roberts’ reasoning tied to presidential accountability.
Sotomayor, who has often criticized President Trump, suggested that rather that “accountability,” the decision would lead to “instability.”
“I’m going to guess,” she said, looking up from her page at courtroom spectators, “… maybe you should, too.”
Sotomayor concluded, “The president emerges with more power than ever before.”
Roberts, composed as ever, appeared unfazed: More power for the president – that has been precisely his aim.
