Humphrey's Executor, the 1935 Case Behind Independent Agencies

William E. Humphrey was not the sort of man progressives write fond histories about. A Republican former congressman from Seattle, he had been appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by Calvin Coolidge in 1925 and had spent his years there steering the agency toward friendlier relations with the businesses it was supposed to police. He made no secret of his view that the commission had been too hard on business before he arrived. In 1931 Herbert Hoover gave him a new seven-year term. Then Franklin Roosevelt took office with a mandate to remake the economy, and in the summer of 1933 he wrote Humphrey a polite letter asking him to resign, explaining that the two of them did not see eye to eye on the commission's policies and that he wanted his own people. Humphrey refused. In October Roosevelt fired him. Humphrey died a few months later, in early 1934, but the executor of his estate kept his lawsuit for back pay alive. More than ninety years later, the case that bears his name sat at the center of the fight over whether a president can fire almost anyone in the federal government at will.

In short: In Humphrey's Executor v. United States, decided unanimously in 1935, the Supreme Court held that Congress could protect members of bodies like the FTC from being fired except for cause. That ruling became the legal foundation for independent agencies. President Trump's removal of two Democratic FTC commissioners in March 2025 sent the question back to the Court, which in June 2026, in Trump v. Slaughter, held that the commissioners' for-cause removal protection is unconstitutional.

What the law said, and what Roosevelt did

The Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914 to police unfair methods of competition. Congress designed it as a bipartisan, multi-member body: five commissioners serving staggered seven-year terms, no more than three from the same party. The law said a commissioner could be removed by the president for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

The idea was that the commission would build expertise over time and apply the law steadily, without lurching every four years with the White House. Staggered terms meant that no single president would ordinarily appoint the whole commission at once.

Roosevelt did not claim that Humphrey was inefficient, negligent or corrupt. His objection was plainly about policy. Humphrey's views did not match the administration's, and Roosevelt believed that he needed agencies that would carry out his program. His lawyers relied on a 1926 Supreme Court decision, Myers v. United States, in which Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president, had written that the president had broad power to remove executive officers he had appointed, in that case a postmaster in Oregon.

Black Monday

The Court decided Humphrey's case on May 27, 1935. The date matters. On the same day, the Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, a centerpiece of the early New Deal, in the Schechter Poultry case, and invalidated a farm mortgage relief law. New Dealers called it Black Monday. All three decisions were unanimous.

Justice George Sutherland, one of the Court's conservatives, wrote the opinion in Humphrey's case. He distinguished Myers. A postmaster, he wrote, is a purely executive officer, part of the president's chain of command. The FTC was different. It was created to act as an expert body, carrying out duties that were, in the language of the time, quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial: investigating industries and reporting to Congress, and deciding cases about unfair competition. Congress could require that such a body be free from the president's control in those functions, and it could do so by limiting the reasons for which commissioners could be removed.

The holding was clear. Roosevelt had removed Humphrey without one of the causes the statute named, so the removal was unlawful, and his estate was owed his salary.

Roosevelt took the day's rulings badly. The defeats of 1935 and 1936 fed his frustration with the Court, which led to his unsuccessful plan in 1937 to add justices. He had come to believe that the justices were blocking the program voters had chosen. Humphrey's case was the least economically important of the three Black Monday decisions, but it was the one aimed most directly at his authority as president.

Progressives on both sides of the argument

Here is a detail that complicates the usual story. In the 1930s, many progressives wanted more presidential control, not less. Roosevelt's own committee on administrative management, known for its chairman Louis Brownlow, reported in 1937 that independent commissions had become a kind of headless branch of government, answering to no one, and recommended bringing their executive functions under the president. Congress did not adopt that part of the plan.

Over the following decades, the politics shifted. Independent agencies multiplied: the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors and many more. Their independence came to be seen as protection for workers, consumers and investors against short-term political pressure and the influence of powerful industries on the White House. Today many progressives defend that independence, while many conservatives, who once criticized FDR's power grabs, argue for a president with near-total control of the executive branch.

The lesson is not that either side is hypocritical. It is that arguments about structure tend to follow arguments about who holds power. A useful test for any position is to imagine the other party in the White House. If a rule would alarm you in the hands of a president you voted against, it deserves a hard look even when the president is one you support. Structure outlasts any single administration, and the precedents set by one party are inherited, intact, by the next.

How the precedent was chipped away

Humphrey's Executor was never formally overruled for decades, but its reach was narrowed.

In 1958, in Wiener v. United States, the Court applied the principle to a war claims commission even though the statute said nothing about removal, reasoning that the body's adjudicative nature implied protection. In 1988, in Morrison v. Olson, the Court upheld for-cause protection for an independent counsel, an official with clearly executive functions, and moved away from the old labels in favor of asking whether a removal restriction impeded the president's ability to do the job. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented alone, and his dissent became a touchstone for the unitary executive theory.

The tide then turned. In 2010, in Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, the Court struck down two layers of for-cause protection for an accounting oversight board. In 2020, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it held that the CFPB's single director could not be protected from removal, stressing that the agency was led by one person rather than a bipartisan group. In 2021, in Collins v. Yellen, it applied the same reasoning to the single director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In each case the majority described Humphrey's Executor as an exception to the general rule of presidential control, limited to multi-member expert bodies that did not wield substantial executive power. Some justices said openly that they would like to revisit it entirely.

March 2025 and the FTC again

In March 2025, President Trump removed the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. The FTC statute still contains the same removal protection that protected Humphrey. The administration did not claim any of the statutory causes. It argued that the protection was unconstitutional, because the modern FTC exercises substantial executive power, including bringing lawsuits and writing rules.

Slaughter sued. A federal district judge ruled that her removal was unlawful under Humphrey's Executor and ordered her restored to her seat. The administration went to the Supreme Court. By then the justices had already, in May 2025, allowed the president to keep members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board out of their posts while their cases went forward, in an emergency order that took care to say the Federal Reserve was different, owing to its unique structure and history. In September 2025 the Court allowed Slaughter's removal to stand for the time being and agreed to hear her case directly, asking the parties to address whether Humphrey's Executor itself should be overruled.

The case, Trump v. Slaughter, therefore put the 1935 decision squarely before the Court. On June 29, 2026, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court held that the for-cause removal protection for FTC commissioners is unconstitutional. That opinion is the one to read in full, alongside the original. What follows is the argument on each side, which will keep shaping this question for years, including for the agencies the ruling did not address.

What independence means for a worker or a shopper

All of this can sound like a seminar on constitutional structure. It is also about very ordinary things.

The National Labor Relations Board decides whether an employer broke the law by firing a worker who tried to organize a union, and whether a union election was fair. The Federal Trade Commission decides whether a merger will raise prices and whether a company's advertising deceived customers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission decides whether a crib or a space heater is dangerous enough to recall. The Securities and Exchange Commission sets the rules for what a company must tell investors before it sells them stock.

When those bodies have members from both parties on fixed terms, the people bringing cases before them can expect a certain steadiness. Rules change with elections, but gradually, as terms expire and new members are confirmed. Decisions are made by a group that includes dissenters, whose written objections show the public where the disagreements lie.

When members can be removed at will, that changes. A board can lose the minority voices that explained what the majority was doing. It can lose its quorum entirely, which happened to the labor board for a time after its members were removed in 2025, leaving cases waiting with no one able to decide them. And every pending matter carries an unspoken question about what the White House wants.

That is why this case matters to people who will never read it. A worker waiting for a ruling on an unfair firing, or a family relying on a product safety recall, has a stake in whether the officials deciding those matters can be fired for deciding them the wrong way.

The strongest case for presidential control

Supporters of the administration's position make an argument rooted in democratic accountability. Voters elect a president, not commissioners. If an agency writes rules with the force of law, brings lawsuits and decides who may merge, someone elected should answer for those choices. Independent agencies, on this view, create officials who wield real power while answering to no one the public can vote out. The Constitution gives the executive power to one person precisely so that responsibility is clear.

They also argue that the 1935 opinion rested on a description of the FTC that was never accurate and is certainly not accurate now. The modern commission is a law enforcement agency in any ordinary sense.

The case for independence

The other side answers that Congress, which is also elected, has always had power to structure the offices it creates. Since 1935 it has built dozens of agencies on the understanding that Humphrey's Executor was good law. Bipartisan commissions with staggered terms were designed to prevent any one administration from bending enforcement toward its friends or against its enemies, and to give businesses and workers some stability in the rules.

There is a practical argument too. If the president can fire commissioners at will, the line between policy and enforcement in particular cases becomes thin. A company that wants a merger approved, or an investigation dropped, would know exactly whom to lobby. That concern applies to presidents of any party.

And there is the Federal Reserve. Almost everyone, including many supporters of broad presidential power, agrees that a central bank whose interest-rate decisions can be overruled by the White House would be dangerous for the economy. The Court itself has signalled that the Fed may be treated differently. Critics of the administration's position argue that any line drawn to protect the Fed alone will be hard to defend on principle.

I think the stronger argument is for independence, with honest limits: bipartisan bodies, clear statutory duties, real oversight by Congress and courts. Agencies are not above politics, and they should not be. But enforcement that turns with each election, and can be directed at a president's opponents or away from his friends, is a bigger threat to fair government than an expert commission with a seven-year term.

What you can do

• Follow the Court. The court watch page lists the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries, its emergency docket and Senate votes on judges.
• Track the cases on agency independence. Our coverage of the courts follows removal cases, the unitary executive theory and what they mean for agencies like the FTC and NLRB.
• Watch the federal workforce. Our page on the government being gutted tracks firings, cuts and the legal fights over them.
• Tell Congress what structure you want. Use our representative lookup to contact your representative and senators and see their latest votes. Congress writes the statutes that create agencies and can redesign them.

William Humphrey was an unlikely hero for independent government. He wanted a commission that went easy on business. But the principle his estate won, that some public bodies should be insulated from the president's day-to-day wishes, has protected regulators of every political stripe. For the FTC, the Court has now said that protection does not hold; how far that ruling reaches beyond the commission is one of the most important structural questions in American government.