LIBN Op-Ed: Supreme Court’s decision politicizes agency appointments

July 10, 2026 | E. Christopher Murray

On July 10, Long Island Business News published Chris Murray’s opinion piece: “Supreme Court’s decision politicizes agency appointments.”

Here is the full text of the essay.

While most attention is being paid to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship, the most far-reaching decision of the recently ended Supreme Court term was Trump v. Slaughter, which ended Congress’ right to restrict the president’s ability to fire officers of administrative agencies.

Reversing a nearly 100-year precedent, the court held that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, a president has the unfettered right to terminate a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), rejecting the express statutory language that a commissioner could only be fired for cause. This major shift will have far-reaching impacts. It gives the president the authority to control agency decisions through the ability to fire the decision makers.

When establishing the FTC, as well as several other powerful agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the statute adopted by Congress and signed into law by the president sought to isolate the agency from overt political pressure. Due in part to the FTC’s powers to promulgate rules and bring enforcement proceedings, the intention was to prevent commissioners from losing their jobs for political reasons. This statute was upheld almost 100 years ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States where Franklin Roosevelt’s was blocked from firing an FTC commissioner because of a policy decision. In that case the court upheld Congress’ right to require cause before firing a commissioner of an independent agency.

With Slaughter, the Supreme Court has overruled this precedent, holding that in limiting the president’s power to fire the FTC commissioner, Congress violated the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution. By doing so, the Supreme Court ignored its own precedent as well as the plain language of the statute that created the agency. The Slaughter decision upends a deliberate balance established for agencies that act in a quasi-judicial function. It also continues the Supreme Court’s trend toward judicial activism that includes campaign finance deregulation, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and immigration and removal protections.

On the same day that Slaughter was decided, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Cook that the limits on the president’s power to terminate Federal Reserve Board governors should stand. The Supreme Court sought to explain this inconsistency with the distinction that the Federal Reserve obtains its funding through fees charged to the member banks and that the financial system relies on the independence of the Federal Reserve. However, the public has a right to expect that decisions by the FTC, EEOC and NLRB will not be at the whim of the president.

By doing away with well-established principles the Supreme Court in Slaughter creates uncertainty about the law and undermines the public’s faith in our court system. The decision substantially increases the president’s power to control agencies and exposes those agencies to the president’s whims and political pressures, which is exactly what Congress sought to avoid when enacting the statute.

E. Christopher Murray is a partner at Rivkin Radler’s Commercial Litigation and Real Estate practice groups. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the firm.

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