The Roberts Court handed the President every federal agency that investigates, regulates, and prosecutes on behalf of the American people — then carved out the Federal Reserve and kept it for itself.

That is the practical effect of Monday’s paired rulings in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook, whatever the majority’s claims about Article II’s original design. In Slaughter, the Court overruled the 91-year-old precedent of Humphrey’s Executor (1935) and held 6-3 that President Trump may fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Biden appointee, from the Federal Trade Commission at will, with no cause required. The same logic now extends to every multi-member independent agency exercising executive power — the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the rest. The agencies still exist. The statutes they enforce remain on the books. The vast delegations of legislative authority Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence pretends to lament are not undone. They are merely centralized. The exact statutory mechanism makes this clear: the rulemaking, adjudication, and enforcement powers remain entirely unchanged. The only thing “for cause” removal protected was multi-member collegial deliberation, not the agencies themselves. The “alphabet soup” is no longer an independent bureaucracy; it is the President’s bureaucracy.

The majority frames Slaughter as a restoration of proper separation of powers eroded by Woodrow Wilson’s rule by experts. Chief Justice Roberts argues that Humphrey’s rested on a highly circumscribed and almost fictional view of the FTC’s role, and that the agency’s modern enforcement footprint — some 80 statutes covering almost every facet of the economy — makes it a quintessentially executive body. The argument has surface appeal, but it elides the structural reason Humphrey’s was crafted in the first place. The bipartisan insulation of multi-member commissions was the point, not an accident. The 1935 Court understood that some agency work sits between pure execution and pure adjudication, and that this work requires independence from any single President to function. Slaughter discards that judgment as a fiction. The fiction is now the majority’s.

The Chief invokes the Founders’ design as a license for executive energy. The framing obscures how far the decision moves the law. The Founders designed a Constitution of separated powers, not a unitary executive empowered to direct every federal enforcement action. The Slaughter majority has converted one half of the design into a sword and discarded the other. The argument that Humphrey’s prevented the President from removing officials charged with enforcing the laws, and compromised the power of Congress by encouraging delegation to agencies, is backwards. Humphrey’s served the constitutional design by insulating agency enforcement from political control, and the deluge of agency rulemaking the majority laments is a creature of congressional choice, not judicial design — a point Justice Elena Kagan made in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article the majority cites but does not engage with. The three Democratic appointees warned in dissent that overturning Humphrey’s will destabilize the federal regulatory apparatus. The warning is not overwrought. It is the structural critique the majority has not answered.

Justice Gorsuch writes a concurrence suggesting that Congress would not have delegated so much authority to agencies subject to presidential removal. The call is welcome in principle — a revived non-delegation doctrine would discipline executive power from a different angle. But the call exposes the movement’s internal contradiction. Gorsuch laments that Congress has delegated too much rulemaking authority and urges the Court to enforce the “intelligible principle” limit. The Roberts Court has repeatedly, explicitly refused to resurrect the non-delegation doctrine when it actually matters, declining to strike down broad statutory delegations in Gundy v. United States (2019) and relying instead on the major-questions doctrine to pick regulatory targets without invalidating the underlying delegations. The Court does not want to invalidate the delegations. It wants to control the delegates. The concurrence reads less like a constitutional principle and more like a roadmap for the next forty years of conservative litigation.

Even with a revived non-delegation doctrine, the agencies that exist today will now be staffed with commissioners removable at the President’s pleasure, and the immediate damage to agency independence is done. By consolidating the administrative state under the President via the removal power, the Court ensures that the vast regulatory apparatus remains intact, but now answers to a single executive. This is not a reduction of state power. It is the weaponization of the administrative state. This is the trajectory the Roberts Court has been building since it began stripping away structural buffers that insulated agency heads from presidential control under the banner of Article II’s Vesting Clause, cloaking the demolition of checks on executive power in the language of liberty — a project that reached its modern apotheosis in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB (2020).

The Cook carve-out is the smoking gun on what the Slaughter majority actually understands about its own doctrine. In Cook (2026), the Chief Justice, joined by Justices Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, held 5-4 that the Federal Reserve occupies a constitutionally distinct status and that its governors may be removed only for cause. The case arose after President Trump attempted to remove Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee, from the Fed Board of Governors based on unproven allegations of mortgage fraud. The Court held that Mr. Trump cannot remove her without first providing notice and opportunity to respond, setting a high bar to prove cause. The carve-out is the only defensible part of the day. Roberts anchors the carve-out in “history and tradition,” citing the First and Second Banks of the United States. Justice Thomas’s dissent nails the cherry-picked history: the First and Second Banks were private corporations with limited sovereign authority; they did not exercise the vast executive regulatory power over the national financial system that the modern Fed wields. The selective sourcing reveals a manufactured record: cite the early Republic banks to exempt the Fed, ignore the actual nature of those banks when the dissent points out they lack sovereign power. The doctrine bends to protect the markets.

Roberts argues that without these constraints, any perceived misstep could provide a pretext for a Governor’s removal, weighing on his decisions and votes. The same logic applies to every agency the Slaughter majority has now opened to presidential control. The Federal Reserve is what every independent agency looks like when the constitutional design is taken seriously. The Slaughter majority has given us the opposite — every agency made political, with the Fed saved because the consequences of politicizing it would be visible to every Justice who reads a financial newspaper. The dispersed costs of politicizing the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, and the rest will be borne by the public, in regulatory actions that will never make the front page.

The Chief and Justice Kavanaugh appear to have made a strategic judgment that they do not trust this President with monetary policy. They are right on the politics, and right on the law. The Slaughter majority should have extended its logic no further. The Cook majority’s carve-out should be the rule, not the exception. The structural result is a regime of presidential aggrandizement, where the administrative state is a potent instrument of executive will, checked only by the Court’s own pragmatic calculation of which institutions are too important to let the President touch. The Court has chosen which costs it will bear. The constitutional design does not bend that way.