The Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Trump v. Slaughter is one of the most important capstone administrative-law decisions in decades. In Slaughter, the Court held that statutory limits preventing the President from removing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners except for cause violate Article II, and largely overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—the 1935 decision that had long insulated the FTC’s independent structure from constitutional attack.
But Slaughter is not the beginning of an attack on independent agencies. Slaughter is instead the culmination of a fifteen-year trend in which the Supreme Court steadily expanded structural constitutional defenses available to regulated parties. Cases preceding Slaughter chipped away at theories of independent federal agencies exercising executive power but unanswerable to the Chief Executive. Cases such as Free Enterprise Fund, Seila Law, Collins, and the litigation in Wilcox all pointed in the same direction: federal agencies could no longer assume that their structure, procedures, and authority would be accepted as constitutional. The common thread was judicial skepticism toward agency arrangements that diluted constitutional accountability. Slaughter represents the point at which those strands converged.
Today in Slaughter, regulated parties have a crystallized line of defense. For regulated businesses and individuals, Slaughter matters because it calls into question the constitutional foundation of enforcement by other agencies built on the same independent-commission model. The decision does not mean every existing investigation, subpoena, rule, administrative prosecution, or consent order disappears automatically. But it does give regulated parties a new and serious separation-of-powers defense to preserve and deploy. The core argument is straightforward: if an agency exercises executive power through officers whom the President cannot remove at will, then the enforcement action may have been initiated, supervised, or adjudicated by officials exercising executive authority in an unconstitutional structure. That argument may support motions to dismiss, requests for stays, objections in administrative proceedings, challenges to subpoenas or civil investigative demands, and preservation of constitutional issues for appellate review.
The agencies most likely to face Slaughter-based defenses are those structured like the FTC: multi-member commissions or boards with political-balance requirements, staggered terms, and protections from removal (whether statutory or arising by implication of Humphrey’s Executor). Under Seila Law and Collins, single-director agencies face the same fate. And, insulated boards within agencies can be challenged just as in Free Enterprise Fund. To be sure, any particular agency action will require a careful case-by-case analysis that considers arguments available to the government and (importantly) concrete causal connections between unconstitutionality and the challenged action. But these needs do not erase these constitutional defenses outright—they simply define the battlefield.
The practical takeaway is this: regulated persons and entities should no longer assume agency enforcement is constitutionally routine. Substantive defenses remain critical, but constitutional defenses now must be examined. If an independent agency is investigating, prosecuting, adjudicating, or seeking penalties, the agency’s structure is now part of the defense analysis. Slaughter turns what once looked like an academic separation-of-powers issue into a practical litigation tool for regulated parties facing federal enforcement. In appropriate cases, that tool must be wielded.
