Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was a powerful — but low-profile — bureaucrat when a New York Times news alert popped up on her phone blasting to the world her firing by President Donald Trump. The Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission had found out only minutes earlier.
Her phone began blowing up as she stood outside her daughter’s school during a rehearsal of “Beauty and the Beast Jr.” Slaughter, who mostly avoided the media, was soon participating in an impromptu news conference on her phone as the musical carried on inside.
When her daughter stepped offstage, Slaughter pushed through a crowd so she could be the first to spill the news to the girl. The fifth-grader burst into tears before asking, “Are you going to fight back?”
“Probably,” Slaughter replied.
Thrust into the spotlight in March, a regulator more comfortable with the minutiae of antitrust issues than the dynamics of a political fight, has emerged as one of the primary opponents of Trump’s war on the federal workforce he disparages as the “deep state.”
Slaughter has not only fought her own dismissal in court, she has defended the work of civil servants before Congress, on podcasts and on TV, speaking out when many others are demoralized from losing jobs and absorbing the president’s repeated attacks.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in her case — which probably will be the first in which the justices render a final decision on the legality of Trump’s moves to fire agency heads and gut agencies.
Many legal experts expect the court to rule against Slaughter — a majority of the justices have signaled support for much of Trump’s argument. The stakes are high: The case could upend how the federal government has been run for nearly a century. A ruling against her could give the president greater control over some two-dozen independent agencies, a major goal in his quest to enlarge his power.
The administration says presidential control will make agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Election Commission and Federal Communications Commission more accountable to voters who elect presidents. Slaughter fears political influence will replace the expertise that has guided decisions on issues such as product safety, banking and media mergers.
In other words, the very work she and some of the roughly 300,000 other civil servants who have been laid off in recent months have unobtrusively carried out for decades. Trump’s purge of the federal workforce is the largest in a single year since World War II.
“The alternative to allowing these agencies to operate as Congress designed is … accruing power to the president,” Slaughter said. “That is something that would be concerning at any time, but really concerning when you have a president who is interested in wielding power for the benefit of himself, his friends and allies — and at the expense of everyday Americans.”
Dismissed
Independent agencies were some of the first targets of Trump’s second-term buzz saw as he slashed government jobs and put the executive branch under a tighter grip.
“My administration will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy, and we will restore true democracy to America again,” Trump said in his first speech to Congress of his current term.
Slaughter watched with trepidation as Trump fired a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board in January and the Democratic chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board in February.
She guessed she might be a target but was still shocked when the email landed in her inbox March 18. Slaughter had spent nearly seven years on the commission and loved the work. Trump had originally appointed her in his first term, and she was reappointed by President Joe Biden.
“Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities,” stated the message sent on behalf of the president.
It was the first time in 91 years a president had tried to fire a member of the FTC, which focuses on consumer protection and increasing business competition. Trump also dismissed the other Democrat on the five-member commission, Alvaro Bedoya, leaving only Republicans.
What struck Slaughter was that Trump had given no reason for her dismissal. Congress insulated the FTC from the president through a law allowing the executive to remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Slaughter said firing her without citing any such reason was a blatant and illegal power grab. Almost immediately, she resolved to sue.
The stakes of her public stand quickly became apparent.
After juggling press calls and her daughter’s performance the night of her firing, Slaughter returned home. She received a knock on her door around 11:30 p.m. as her four children slept. It was a pizza delivery she had not ordered. Bedoya got one, too, the same night.
They concluded the pizzas were probably part of a wave sent to the homes of judges and other officials, most of whom had ruled against or opposed Trump’s policies — a reminder that potential assailants knew where they lived. They alerted police and scrubbed personal information from the internet.
But she and Bedoya resolved to stay in the public eye despite the risks. Days later, Slaughter appeared before a House committee to testify about her firing.
“I will not be the first to go down without a fight, and neither will Commissioner Bedoya,” Slaughter told the legislators. “We swore an oath to serve the American people and our Constitution, and I believe that the law will vindicate our right to finish the job.”
The legal fight
That was not so easily accomplished.
The path to the Supreme Court has been winding and full of setbacks. Bedoya had to drop out along the way. His family was struggling financially with one paycheck. The problems were compounded when someone tried to take out a $500,000 line of credit in his name, an act he suspects was tied to his speaking out about his firing.
“It is not fun to take on the president of the United States, particularly in this environment,” Bedoya said. “It’s not fun to not know where your next paycheck will come from or if you will get a paycheck, period.”
Slaughter carried on, with her husband, who works for an investment firm, shouldering the financial load for the family and with help from pro bono attorneys. She has continued to publicly weigh in on matters before the FTC as if she were still on the job, while speaking and making media appearances to draw attention to her case.
“Mommy, I thought that being fired would make you less busy,” Slaughter recalled her 6-year-old daughter telling her.
In July, a federal judge ruled she could return to her job while her case played out in the courts. When Slaughter arrived back to work on a Friday, about two-dozen FTC staffers stood outside and clapped as she entered the building.
The return was exhilarating — but short-lived. By the following Monday, an appeals court had paused her reinstatement. In September, the appeals court ruled she could return to work again, but the Supreme Court soon stayed that order until it makes a final ruling on her dismissal.
Slaughter joked she is the first person in history fired from the FTC three times but said “the whiplash was really disheartening.” Even more disturbing were the glimpses she got inside the FTC during her second stint back.
It was an agency transformed.
“There were a lot of questions about political interference,” Slaughter said of two staff meetings she held. “People seem demoralized. People felt beaten down.”
A case with major ramifications
Slaughter’s case is in many ways a redo of another that changed the course of the federal government nine decades ago.
Through the late 1800s, presidents regularly rewarded political supporters with federal jobs. But the spoils system, as it was called then, was phased out after a backer of President James Garfield who had been denied a position assassinated him. Congress passed new laws for a nonpartisan civil service and prevented some officials from being removed for political reasons.
A major test of those standards came in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired an FTC commissioner over policy disagreements related to economic regulation and the New Deal. William E. Humphrey sued, saying he could be removed only for cause under the law that created the FTC.
The Supreme Court sided with Humphrey, upholding Congress’s ability to limit the president’s firing of the heads of independent agencies. The case, known as Humphrey’s Executor, is little known to the general public, but it has outsize legal importance.
University of Michigan law professor Daniel A. Crane credited it with “paving the way for the modern administrative state” — the alphabet soup of agencies that rely on technical expertise to regulate interest rates, bank deposits, labor disputes and more.
The agencies are often run by bipartisan commissions, whose members are appointed to staggered terms and can be removed only for cause. The idea was to mitigate political pressure on the agencies, so they could make decisions based on expertise and technical knowledge, rather than political considerations.
Backers of the idea of independent agencies worry the demise of Humphrey’s Executor will mean presidents could politicize regulation of baby food, credit card fees and a host of other things to please cronies, big donors and ideological allies.
“The last thing we want is for industry to be able to come in and insert their favorite folks on commissions,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America. “Congress designed these agencies to be independent for a reason. There’s a lot at stake.”
The Trump administration counters by arguing the contemporary FTC is far different from the one that existed when Humphrey’s Executor was decided. The agency now wields significant executive power, so the president — as head of the executive branch — has the constitutional authority to remove its commissioners.
“In this case, the lower courts have once again ordered the reinstatement of a high-level officer wielding substantial executive authority whom the President has determined should not exercise any executive power,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a court filing.
The position is in keeping with a muscular vision of the presidency embraced by Trump and some conservatives, known as the unitary executive theory, that holds the president should have unfettered control over hiring and firing in the executive branch.
So far, the court has appeared to endorse that idea in temporary orders allowing Trump to remove Democrats from the National Labor Relations Board, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Merit Systems Protection Board. Those orders aren’t final decisions on the merits of the cases but give a strong suggestion of where the court’s majority is headed, legal experts say.
“The Supreme Court has given every indication it will overrule Humphrey’s Executor,” Crane said.
Despite the seemingly long odds, Slaughter remains hopeful she will prevail. On a recent morning, she was once again making her case in public before a conference of women who work on antitrust issues.
“Why are you staying in the fight?” the host asked.
Slaughter said that independent agencies are crucial for protecting Americans and that she was taking a stand against Trump’s lawlessness. Trump should have sought a change in the law if he wanted to dismiss her, she said.
“As a person who took an oath to the Constitution, I feel very strongly that when that process for changing the law isn’t followed, then I need to stand up and push back,” Slaughter said. “I really recognize deeply how many people in this country are not in a position to do that. I am, so I have the obligation to do it.”
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