Trump’s Firing of FTC Commissioner Was Illegal: Judge

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has been restored as a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington on Aug. 6, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump’s termination of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter is illegal under a decades-old Supreme Court ruling, a federal judge concluded on July 17.

The 1935 Supreme Court ruling, known as Humphrey’s Executor, upheld legal limitations Congress placed on removing members of the FTC.

Lawmakers said that presidents could only remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Trump fired Slaughter earlier this year. In a letter explaining the decision, the White House said keeping her in place would be inconsistent with the Trump administration’s priorities.

“The answer to the key substantive question in this case—whether a unanimous Supreme Court decision about the FTC Act’s removal protections applies to a suit about the FTC Act’s removal protections—seems patently obvious,” U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan said in her ruling on Thursday.

“In arguing for a different result, Defendants ask this court to ignore the letter of Humphrey’s Executor and embrace the critiques from its detractors. Defendants hope that, after doing so, this court will bless what amounts to the implied overruling of a ninety-year-old, unanimous, binding precedent. Because ‘it is [the Supreme] Court’s prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents,’ the court cannot, and will not, fulfill that request.”

“The President continues to nominate brilliant individuals to advance his America First agenda,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The President claims he has inherent and absolute power to bypass laws Congress put in place to make sure that traditional independent agencies protect the rights and interests of the American people. The court correctly rejected that claim,” lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing Slaughter wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

AliKhan said Slaughter’s purported firing does not have an effect. She will remain a member of the FTC until Sept. 25, 2029, when her term ends, unless she is removed for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, according to the order.

The Department of Justice has already appealed. In a motion to stay the order pending the outcome of the appeal, government attorneys said that AliKhan’s decision “constitutes an extraordinary intrusion into the President’s authority.”

Slaughter and another commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, whom Trump also fired, sued the president in March over the moves.

Government lawyers had pointed to recent rulings from the Supreme Court, including a stay of lower court rulings that kept members of multimember labor boards terminated, at least for now.

AliKhan noted that the Supreme Court wrote that legal questions in those cases were being left “for resolution after full briefing and argument,” and that the court did not mention Humphrey’s Executor at all.

“The sole justification for granting the application was that the President ’may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents,'” she wrote. “Humphrey’s Executor, of course, is one of those precedents, and it dealt with, as here, the FTC. Accordingly, any suggestion that Humphrey’s Executor may not extend to other agencies cannot be read as an invitation to sidestep its application to the FTC.”

The judge did side with the Trump administration regarding Bedoya, who has resigned as an FTC commissioner. That means his claims are moot, the judge said.