The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint called a 1935 Supreme Court precedent “ripe for revisiting — and perhaps sooner than later.”
Sooner came quickly.
The court is holding a hearing Monday on whether to overturn that precedent, called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which has protected independent agencies from presidential interference. The Trump administration has prioritized dismantling that independence, and the court’s Republican-appointed majority has been helping him do so across several agencies whose work affects critical aspects of American life.
Monday’s case, called Trump v. Slaughter, is the court’s latest opportunity to empower the Republican president, though its ruling will last beyond Donald Trump 
— unless and until a future high court majority reverses whatever this one does in its forthcoming decision.
The 1935 precedent is named for a lawsuit brought by the estate of William Humphrey. He was on the Federal Trade Commission, the five-person consumer protection agency whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate; commissioners’ staggered terms span administrations; and no more than three of them can be from the same political party. President Franklin Roosevelt sought to fire Humphrey in 1933 before the commissioner’s term was up, and his executor sued for his salary from the time that Roosevelt said he was fired until his death in 1934.
The high court sided with Humphrey while stressing the importance of the agency’s independence. The court noted that the law establishing the FTC said presidents can remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and that the government hadn’t made such a claim against Humphrey. “The commission is to be non-partisan; and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality,” the court said.
Fast-forward to a century later, when Trump sought to fire Democratic commissioner Rebecca Slaughter from that same agency without cause. Citing the Humphrey’s precedent, a federal judge rejected the move, as did an appellate panel – over dissent from a Trump appointee.
Heading into Monday’s hearing in Washington, the partisan split is clear on the high court, too. When it agreed in September to consider the administration’s appeal, the GOP-appointed majority also granted the government’s request to provisionally approve Slaughter’s firing while the litigation continues. The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented.
Writing for the trio, Justice Elena Kagan noted that, under current precedent, Trump can’t fire a commissioner without cause. “To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey’s: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress’s judgment about agency design,” she wrote. “The majority may be raring to take that action,” she wrote, adding that “until the deed is done, Humphrey’s controls, and prevents the majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him.” Monday’s hearing could illuminate how much more power the court is prepared to give Trump, though we won’t know for sure until the court rules in its decision expected by early July. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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