The Supreme Court’s conservative majority signalled on Monday, December 8, 2025, that it is ready to back President Donald Trump’s push to effectively take over independent agencies within the federal government and possibly overturn a 1935 precedent that has for decades insulated those entities from White House control.

At the centre of the case is Trump’s decision in March to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, despite a federal law that requires presidents to show cause, such as malfeasance, before booting the leaders of agencies run by multi-member boards. The court’s decision could have sweeping implications beyond the FTC.

After two-and-a-half hours of argument, the court’s six-justice conservative bloc appeared to be aligned with Trump, while the court’s three-justice liberal wing was staunchly opposed. A decision in the major separation of powers case is expected before the end of June 2026.

Who would destroy govt more?

Liberal and conservative justices both spent considerable time weighing what they viewed as the potential practical implications of siding with Trump or ruling against him.

Led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s three-justice liberal wing peppered Solicitor General D. John Sauer with questions about which agencies would be affected if Trump could fire the members, and therefore have greater control, over the Federal Trade Commission.

“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” Sotomayor told Sauer at one point early in the discussion.

But several of the court’s conservatives flipped that idea around and pressed Slaughter’s attorney on whether Congress could just restructure Cabinet-level agencies like the Department of the Interior in a way that would bar a president from firing the secretary. That, they suggested, would also upend the federal government. And why, several justices asked, couldn’t that happen under Slaughter’s theory?

“They’re not elected, as Congress and the president are and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative wing, said of the independent agencies at issue in the case.

“The sky will not fall,” said Sauer, the administration’s top appellate attorney. “The entire government will move toward accountability to the people.”

Decaying husk of precedent

Trump is asking the justices to overturn a decades-old decision in which the court ruled that Congress does have the power to require a president to show cause before firing independent agency leaders.

The modern court has repeatedly chipped away at the 1935 ruling, known as Humphrey’s Executor v. US, and the dispute before the justices Monday gives them a chance to bury it. But whether they choose to do that or simply further erode it is something the conservative majority will grapple with in the coming months.

Justice Neil Gorsuch at one point described the precedent as “poorly reasoned.”

Sauer got right to his request for the justices to finally kill the 90-year-old precedent as he began making his pitch to the justices, describing the case as a “decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions” that was wreaking havoc in lower courts.

Roberts at one point also described the decision as a “dried husk.”