As a young staff member in the Reagan administration, John G. Roberts Jr. was part of a group of lawyers who pushed for more White House control over independent government agencies.
The “time may be ripe to reconsider the existence of such entities, and take action to bring them back within the executive branch,” the future chief justice of the United States advised the White House counsel in a 1983 memo. Independent agencies, he wrote, were a “Constitutional anomaly.”
Once he ascended to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts joined other conservatives on the bench in a series of rulings that have chipped away at Congress’s power to constrain the president’s authority to fire independent regulators.
That decadeslong project of the conservative legal movement collides on Monday with President Trump’s desire to oust officials across the government, in defiance of federal laws meant to protect their jobs and shield them from politics.
The result, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions suggest, is that the majority will likely side with Mr. Trump in a move that could significantly shift power from Congress to the president and usher in a dramatic change in the way the federal government is structured.
“This is not a bolt out of the blue,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing an agency official in a separate case who was also fired by the president.
“There is a tendency to see this as merely part of a recent short-term drama about President Trump, but really a majority of the justices have long been sympathetic to the argument that the Trump administration is making here — and that’s a view that transcends this presidency,” he said.
Monday’s case specifically tests whether President Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, simply because he says she does not align with his agenda — despite a law that says the president can only remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The administration is asking the justices to toss a 90-year-old precedent that said the Constitution allowed laws like that one and let Congress put limits on the president’s authority to dismiss some quasi-independent government officials.
The court’s ruling, expected by the end of June, has implications for more than two dozen other agencies that are charged with protecting consumers, workers, the environment and nuclear safety, and have traditionally been insulated from complete presidential control by similar laws.
Since he returned to the White House, Mr. Trump has repeatedly ousted Democratic leaders of independent agencies, including at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to make way for replacements who share his policy priorities.
A number of the officials have sued. The Supreme Court has generally allowed their firings to take effect but has done so in temporary emergency orders while their lawsuits proceeded through lower courts. In Ms. Slaughter’s case, the court will render a final and lasting judgment on the legality of Mr. Trump’s firings, a major test for the justices to determine how far to expand presidential power.
In January, the Supreme Court will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. In that case, the justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank’s history may mean it can be uniquely insulated from presidential interference.
The Trump administration’s robust view of the executive is being weighed by a conservative Supreme Court majority that has also embraced the so-called unitary executive theory. That is the idea, dating back to the Reagan administration, that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president and that he must be able to control everything the executive branch does.
Some conservatives on the court have been signaling for years that they were eager to overturn the precedent, decided in 1935, that protects independent agencies.
In a 2010 decision, Chief Justice Roberts said the president’s power generally includes “the authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties. Without such power, the president could not be held fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities.”
Then, in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the court took a major step toward expanding the president’s power to fire independent officials. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court said the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire the director without cause.
But the majority decision, again written by the chief justice, made a distinction between government agencies run by a single director and those led by multimember commissions that “do not wield substantial executive power.”
In its recent emergency orders, the court, with three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, has telegraphed strongly that it is now poised to give the president more direct control over those agencies as well.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the president,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion in May, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.”
Such orders have drawn vigorous dissents from the court’s three liberal justices, who accused the majority of displaying “impatience” to decide the fate of the 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The majority, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in September, seemed determined to “extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”
Created in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission protects consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power. Like other independent agencies, it was designed by Congress to be shielded from politics. It is led by five commissioners who serve staggered seven-year terms; no more than three can be members of the same party.
Ms. Slaughter, first nominated by Mr. Trump in 2018, was renominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2023, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate to a term that expires in 2029. Mr. Trump dismissed her in March in an email that said her service was “inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” She then sued.
Mr. Trump dismissed a second Democrat, Alvaro Bedoya, as well. He initially challenged his firing but later resigned, citing financial pressures. As a result, the F.T.C. has been led by only Republicans since March.
Lower-court judges sided with Ms. Slaughter. A district court judge said that her firing was illegal and pointed to the job protections upheld by the 1935 decision.
Echoing the chief justice’s arguments dating to the 1980s, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, told the justices that those tenure protections are unconstitutional because they infringe on the president’s power to run the executive branch. The heads of government agencies are essentially the president’s “alter ego” and his ability to oust regulators is an “indispensable tool of control,” he said in a filing.
The F.T.C. regulates matters ranging from credit cards to horseracing, he added, and Congress cannot empower “unelected agency heads to wield executive power walled off from presidential control and electoral accountability.”
Pointing to the recent Supreme Court decisions, he wrote that if the 1935 precedent “is not already a dead letter, this court should overrule it.”
(As a secondary matter, Mr. Sauer said courts have no power to reinstate Ms. Slaughter even if she was improperly removed.)
The administration’s position has the backing of former Republican attorneys general Edwin Meese and Michael B. Mukasey and groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and the New Civil Liberties Union.
Ms. Slaughter’s legal team is led by Amit Agarwal, a former law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. He contested the administration’s view of the Constitution’s text and of history and urged the court not to transfer to the president “vast new powers that Congress and prior presidents, working together, chose not to vest in the president alone.”
Her lawyers noted that in the years since the court first held that Congress could adopt job protections for independent agency chiefs, 15 presidents of both parties worked within that system and accepted that F.T.C. commissioners could not be removed without good cause. Congress has also created dozens of new independent agencies that have wide-ranging responsibilities.
Overruling that precedent decades later “would profoundly destabilize institutions that are now inextricably intertwined with the fabric of American governance,” Mr. Agarwal wrote.
Ms. Slaughter’s position has support from former chairs of the commission nominated by presidents of both parties, who say the president has plenty of power to shape the agency’s agenda, as well as dozens of former high-level Republican administration officials. Those officials cite recent scholarship that suggests that Congress has had broad authority since the founding era to structure the executive branch and to limit the president’s power to fire people. That argument is designed to appeal to the court’s conservatives who consider themselves originalists, interpreting the Constitution based on its meaning when adopted.
David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor who worked in the solicitor general’s office during the Reagan administration, said the case poses “a test for people who consider themselves originalists” because the historical record of the issue at the founding is “at least equivocal.”
Despite the debate among originalist scholars, the court’s three liberal justices have said in recent dissents that their conservative colleagues have made clear where they are headed.
In September, Justice Kagan wrote that the court’s majority, order by order, “has handed full control” of a series of agencies to the president.
The majority, she added, appeared to be “raring” to overturn the 1935 precedent. Still, she wrote, “until the deed is done,” it would remain in effect.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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