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The Supreme Court Just Gave Trump a Terrifying New Power

In a pair of twin rulings, the court undermined the independence of the key independent agencies—except one.

US President Donald Trump during a kickoff celebration for the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington.

On Monday, the Supreme Court vastly expanded the president’s power by ending the independence of the country’s independent executive agencies. It did this in a ruling that gives the president the power to fire the people who run these agencies “at will” rather than “for cause.” This change doesn’t just mean that Donald Trump and Elon Musk can chainsaw their way through the federal government. It means that Trump, or whoever is president after him, can undermine the entire regulatory structure that constrains the smash-and-grab capitalism favored by the Epstein class. It means that institutions that regulate business, banks, public health, and the environment are nothing more than puppets of the administration in charge.

There is, however, one key agency, and one alone, that is protected from the whims of the president: The Federal Reserve Board. That’s right, the institution that protects the monetary policy that capitalists rely on to make their billions is the one agency that can’t be messed with every time the president has a nutty. In a second case, the court ruled that the president does not not have the power to fire a board member of the Fed.

What makes the Federal Reserve Board so special? I have my theories, and all of them involve the justices’ business sense—and not their legal acumen.

The facially contradictory rulings arrived via two decisions, both written by Roberts, that were literally bound together with a rubber band when the court handed the opinions out to reporters. In Trump v. Slaughter, the court ruled, 6–3, that Donald Trump could fire Rebecca Slaughter from her position as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. In Trump v. Cook, the court ruled, 5–4, that Trump could not fire Lisa Cook, a board member on the Federal Reserve.

Roberts would have you believe that the differences between the two outcomes stem from the differences in the two agencies. In Slaughter, Roberts argued that Trump can fire Slaughter whenever he wants because Congress does not have the authority to create an independent executive agency whose leaders cannot be fired at will by the president. He argued that such protections violate the constitutional separation of powers.

Roberts’s exact argument was rejected by the Supreme Court 90 years ago in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. US. That case involved Franklin Delano Roosevelt trying to fire (wait for it) a commissioner on the FTC. Roosevelt, like Trump, didn’t really have a reason for firing the commissioner. He just felt that it was a bad idea to have a member of the opposition party on a commission that was tasked with implementing some of his New Deal policies. In Humphrey’s Executor, the court rejected Roosevelt’s attempt to give the president more power and upheld the independence of executive agencies.

That precedent didn’t matter to Roberts. He explicitly overruled Humphrey’s Executor, writing: “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it.”

As justification for this wholesale rejection of precedent, Roberts turned back to the Reconstruction era and adopted the arguments laid out by former Confederates eager to amplify the power of President Andrew Johnson in the face of a progressive Congress. The post–Civil War Congress had passed a law requiring Johnson to consult Congress not just about the appointment of officials but also about removing........

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