The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a high-stakes case that could reshape the balance of power between the White House and independent federal agencies.
At issue is whether a president can remove leaders of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission without showing cause — a question that has lingered since the start of the current administration.
The case challenges a 1935 precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which allowed Congress to protect officials at independent agencies from being dismissed at will. Overturning this ruling would grant presidents sweeping new authority to replace agency officials who enforce anti-trust, labor, and consumer protection laws.
The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from that decision.
The court’s majority, Kagan wrote, “may be raring” to invalidate for-cause removal requirements approved by Congress. But until it does, she wrote, a 1935 precedent on that issue should control.
“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” she wrote, echoing a point she made earlier in the year in a similar case. “Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation’s separation of powers.”
In a separate order Monday, the court declined to hear arguments in two related cases – one dealing with Cathy Harris, former chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which reviews federal firings and can reinstate wrongly terminated workers, and another focused on Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board. Those moves effectively focus the dispute on the FTC.
