The president's new power over independent agencies

The Supreme Court just handed the president the power to fire the heads of nearly every federal agency that regulates the American economy—the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—and then carved out a single exception for the Federal Reserve because, in Chief Justice Roberts’s words, the Fed is just that important. University of Michigan law professor Leah Littman called that reasoning “frankly ridiculous” and warned that the decision will produce “pretty stark vacillations” in regulatory policy every time the White House changes hands.

What the Court actually did

The Court’s ruling in Slaughter v. FCC announced a sweeping new rule: there can be no truly independent agencies because the president must have the power to fire every executive branch official, no exceptions. That doctrine, known as the unitary executive theory, has been a long-standing goal of conservative legal activists. As Littman put it, the Court “just handed the president the power to dictate what the heads of those agencies do,” and we have already seen what happens when agencies are subject to direct presidential control: “persecuting perceived enemies and granting favors to friends.”