Handing agency oversight to Trump is a fatal blow to public trust 

The Supreme Court last month took away a pillar of agency independence. It is a monumental change in the law, and one made more important when we recognize why we had agency independence in the first place.

For most of the country’s history, Congress has been able to bar presidents from firing federal employees — from the heads of independent regulatory agencies down to career civil servants. In Trump v. Slaughter, the court ruled that this common statutory limitation on presidential power was unconstitutional. It granted the president the power to fire any agency head (and, perhaps, any agency employee) for any reason — even purely political reasons. 

This is a brave new world, and not just because concrete regulatory policies will now be subject to much greater political control by the president. With Trump v. Slaughter, something even more important to our democracy took a body blow. That something is trust: trust in the information that agencies routinely communicate to the public and that the public relies on in countless ways to navigate (quite literally) our complex and dangerous world.

We’re so reliant on this information that we barely recognize where it comes from. GPS technology, the weather forecast, public advisories of tainted food recalls — all of this and much more comes from administrative agencies. In many ways, agencies do not even have to exercise legal power to influence the world. A lot of regulation, it turns out, is accomplished through self-regulation by people who are empowered to avoid harms and pursue their freedoms with the benefit of good, reliable information procured and produced by agencies.

Agency independence was a bulwark against the president using the........

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