Roberts Gives Trump the Government, Keeps the Money

A Supreme Court hands a president absolute power to fire anyone in any agency, then immediately refuses to give him the same power over one institution that controls interest rates.

"The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him."

— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Trump v. Slaughter

On Monday, June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued two opinions in the same morning that cannot logically coexist. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote both. In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6-3 majority overruled a 91-year-old precedent and declared that the president can fire members of independent federal agencies without any cause whatsoever. In Trump v. Cook, decided the same day, the same court blocked Trump from firing a Federal Reserve governor, upholding the for-cause removal protections in exactly the same kind of statute that Slaughter just struck down.

Roberts's explanation for the contradiction amounted to nothing more than "the Fed is different." It is. It is different because Roberts wants it to be different.

Translation: the unitary executive theory gets to apply everywhere except where the justices' own retirement portfolios might tremble.

The Slaughter decision dismantled Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the 1935 ruling that established Congress's authority to create agencies insulated from presidential dismissal. The precedent survived the Lochner era, the New Deal, the court-packing crisis, and eight subsequent chief justices. It lasted until John Roberts wrote for a conservative supermajority that none of those people understood the Constitution.

"The answer, then as now, is that these officers exercise the President's power, not their own, and thus must be responsible to him," Roberts wrote. In other words, Congress can create agencies, but Congress cannot control anything about them. Not their independence, not their tenure, not their ability to function without fear of arbitrary dismissal.

Justice Neil Gorsuch called it restoring balance. Justice Sotomayor called it what it is: centuries of practice undone because three branches of government "have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time."

The practical consequences arrive immediately. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was fired from the Federal Trade Commission by Trump in late 2025 because she would not serve as a loyalist. With Humphrey's Executor dead, her removal stands. But the ruling extends far beyond the FTC. More than 50 independent agencies across the federal government now face the prospect of wholesale purges. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The Federal Election Commission. The Merit Systems Protection Board. All of them relied on Humphrey's Executor to shield their commissioners from at-will removal.

Sotomayor spelled out a scenario that sounds like political science fiction until Monday morning: a president could fire all commissioners of the opposing party on agencies like the FEC, where bipartisan membership is legally required. With enough arbitrary dismissals, "the multimember structure itself could be eliminated, by executive fiat, with sufficient arbitrary firings to winnow a commission down to a sole remaining chair."

Fixed terms mean nothing. Bipartisan appointment requirements are meaningless. The only thing that protects a federal agency commissioner now is the president's good mood.

Slaughter herself warned of the dangers in court before the decision came down. A fired FTC commissioner should not have to beg the Supreme Court to tell her that her statutory protections were real.

Then came Cook. Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook was fired by Trump in August 2025 over allegations that she had misrepresented a second home's primary residence status to obtain favorable mortgage terms. Cook denied the charges and called it a manufactured pretext designed to remove her because she resisted pressure to lower interest rates faster.

In his Cook opinion, Roberts wrote that Congress limited presidential removal power for Fed governors "for good reason." He noted that accepting Trump's argument would mean "allowing presidents to fire governors for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after." He said that would "turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment."

Those are the same words Roberts used in Slaughter to describe the Humphrey's Executor precedent he had just destroyed. The only difference is that monetary policy affects stock prices.

Four of the six conservative justices dissented in Cook, and for deeply telling reasons. Clarence Thomas called the majority "incorrect" because it upheld removal protections for some officials and struck them down for others. "The Court makes many policy arguments for an 'independent' banking agency that exercises executive power free from accountability, but those are ultimately arguments against the Constitution," Thomas wrote.

Even the most ardent unitary executive theorist on the court could not sustain the contradiction. The Fed was a carve-out the conservatives could not stomach, because the alternative would mean a president setting interest rates by whim. The problem is that the legal reasoning required to save the Fed was identical to the reasoning Roberts just destroyed in Slaughter.

The administration was not deterred. Trump posted on social media that the Cook justices sent the case back "on a strictly procedural basis" and vowed to take "appropriate action immediately." What action? The court's own opinion laid out that Cook was entitled to "some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due."

Trump's firing letter was a social media post. His evidence was a single allegation about mortgage documents. His procedure was zero. By the court's own standard, which Roberts authored, Trump had no case.

Meanwhile, the broader administrative state faces a new reality. The administration had already stripped civil service protections from thousands of senior federal employees via executive order, reclassifying them as policy positions. The DOJ had declared that immigration judges needed no due process protections. Now Slaughter gives the president authority over principal officers at every independent agency.

The trajectory is clear: strip protections layer by layer until the entire federal workforce serves at the pleasure of one person. The spoils system of the 19th century, when federal jobs went to whoever campaigned hardest, is being resurrected for an era of 350 million people and a federal government that manages nuclear power, financial regulation, food safety, and public health.

The historical context makes the Slaughter decision even more staggering. Humphrey's Executor was born from a fight over whether the federal government could regulate itself during the worst economic crisis in American history. Roosevelt's New Deal agencies were the mechanism for that regulation. The Supreme Court of the 1930s struck them down. Roosevelt fought back. Humphrey's Executor was the compromise: the president runs the executive branch, but Congress can create agencies that exercise quasi-judicial or quasi-legislative authority, and those agencies need insulation from political retaliation.

Without that insulation, every expert who enforces consumer protection laws, monitors drug safety, regulates securities markets, or ensures nuclear plants do not leak radiation serves at the pleasure of whoever occupies the White House. The competence of the federal government depends on the idea that a person can be hired for expertise, not loyalty, and kept for performance, not sycophancy.

The Roberts Court has eliminated that idea. It has replaced 91 years of administrative law with a single sentence from a concurrence: "The Court today takes a notable step back toward the Constitution."

Sotomayor's parting observation in dissent cuts closer to reality: "The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow."

The Supreme Court handed a president the power to run the government by whim. It just made an exception for the one institution whose whim would cost the justices money.