Justice Sonia Sotomayor grilled Solicitor General D. John Sauer on Monday over his argument that the president should be permitted to fire independent agency heads without cause, claiming such a ruling would be a radical change of the government’s current structure.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Slaughter on Monday, weighing whether President Donald Trump may fire Democrat-appointed FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause, possibly expanding the president’s firing power over independent agency heads.
Sotomayor, early on in the lengthy hearing, asked Sauer if the high court had previously issued a ruling reversing a prior ruling that “fundamentally altered the structure of government.” She then claimed the Justice Department was asking the high court to “distort” the structure of government by reversing its long-standing 1935 precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which required presidents to show cause for the firings of FTC commissioners.
“Neither the King nor parliament nor prime ministers, England at the time of the founding, ever had an unqualified removal power,” Sotomayor said. “You’re asking us to say that at a time, the founding, when the Constitution doesn’t speak about this at all, where there was robust debate over this issue among legal scholars at the time, that we ourselves have said repeatedly in Humphrey’s and other cases, Wiener, even in Myers, that those cases you mentioned did not establish this absolute power of the president.”
“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” she added.
Sauer rejected that assertion, claiming the Trump administration’s position — that the president should have power to remove independent agency heads without cause — would instead undo a previous alteration of government.
“The fundamental alteration of the structure of the government was ushered in by Humphrey’s, and then the Congress kind of took Humphrey’s and ran with it in the building of the modern administrative state and the proliferation of independent agencies that are insulated from democratic control,” Sauer said.
While Sotomayor and the other liberal justices were sharply skeptical of Sauer’s arguments, the conservative majority on the high court appeared more skeptical of arguments from Slaughter’s lawyer, Amit Agarwal.
SUPREME COURT GRAPPLES WITH HOW MUCH EXECUTIVE POWER INDEPENDENT AGENCIES REALLY EXERT
The Slaughter case is the third in which the Supreme Court has seen an independent agency head firing on its emergency docket in recent months, with the high court allowing firings in the interim in the two previous cases. With Slaughter, the high court again allowed the firing in the interim but also elevated the case to its merits docket, paving the way for the justices to consider the constitutional questions behind the firings rather than just the procedural issue of whether agency heads can stay on while the case plays out.
A decision in Trump v. Slaughter is expected within the coming months, with all decisions for the Supreme Court’s current term expected to be released by the end of June 2026.