President Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts before a joint session of Congress, Tuesday, March 4, 2025.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty

Oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday over the president’s power to remove the commissioners of independent agencies left little doubt that its Republican-appointed justices are about to fundamentally reorder our system of government. They appear ready to eliminate most pockets of expertise and nonpartisanship that we rely on as stewards of important economic, political, scientific, and regulatory power.

They will do this, if this morning’s arguments are any indication, without grappling with the predictable and disastrous fallout, with the endpoint of their own logic, or the historical record to the contrary. Instead, the six Republican appointees appear ready to race headlong into a Trumpian future in which no agency or decision is beyond the reach of the precedent’s political cronies. 

“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed Monday, “and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.”

FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Trump and Biden appointee whose case is now before the court, sued after Trump fired her in March for not aligning with his agenda, despite his being prohibited from removing commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Slaughter’s case hearkens to the earliest days of the republic, when Congress first created independent agencies with limits on the president’s ability to remove the commissioners who run them. In their modern incarnation, beginning in the late 19th century, Congress has placed these agencies under the direction of a bipartisan group of commissioners who serve set, staggered terms and can only be removed for cause. The goal is to create expertise and independence, so that some of the government’s work is insulated from the abusive pull of political decision-making.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the for-cause removal protections for independent agency commissioners in a ruling known as Humphrey’s Executor. But since taking office in January, Trump has removed the Democratic commissioners from several of these agencies, in violation of the Humphrey’s Executor precedent and multiple laws, seeking to eliminate their independence. He’s fired Democratic commissioners of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the FTC’s Slaughter.

It wasn’t a mystery where this case was headed. For years, the Roberts Court has sought to weaken and undermine Humphrey’s Executor, to reshape the federal government as a quasi-monarchical institution in which the president controls everything in the executive branch. This goal is intellectualized through the unitary........

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