The whole thing blew open on September 22, 2025, when the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump the power to gut the Federal Trade Commission with nothing more than a flick of his wrist. Trump v. Slaughter. The case name alone sounds like a lost pulp novel from a drugstore rack, but it is real, and the order is live. Justice Elena Kagan shouted into the void about Humphrey’s Executor, that old 1935 monument to agency independence, but the majority treated it like a dog-eared manual found in the glovebox of a junked Buick.
We have seen this movie before. Franklin Roosevelt tried to dump William Humphrey in 1933 for being disloyal. The law said no. Roosevelt did it anyway. Humphrey died, his estate carried on, and the Court slapped Roosevelt down. That was the birth of independent commissions, a thin wall against the raging executive. And now, ninety years later, the wall is cracking, the mortar is crumbling, and the current President is stomping around the ruins like a man who just inherited the keys to a dynamite shed.
The majority has been whittling away at Humphrey’s like termites for years. Seila Law v. CFPB cracked it open in 2020, and in 2025 the whole thing is being fed into the grinder. One emergency order after another: the NLRB, the MSPB, the CPSC, now the FTC. Each time, the Court said yes, go ahead, clear them out. Each time, Congress’s old protections were brushed aside like cigarette ash on the floor.
Kagan said it plain. The precedent is still binding. You cannot pretend it is gone until you actually kill it. But that is exactly what is happening. Humphrey’s Executor lives in the casebooks but not in reality. A skeleton in the closet, stripped for parts.
And here is the twist nobody wants to face: Trump will not sit in the driver’s seat forever. Whatever the Court lets him do, the next president will do too. One president will sweep out commissioners to favor religious schools and charities. The next will sweep them out to hammer those same schools and charities with new rules. Every four years the pendulum swings, and the referees get replaced. The fights over religion, commerce, and law will not be neutral contests. They will be rigged machines, tuned by whoever holds the wrench.
December 2025 is when the Court will hear arguments to decide whether to kill Humphrey’s Executor for good. Until then the engine roars, the bolts rattle, and the President grips the controls like a joyrider on a midnight run. And when the machine lurches off the tracks into questions of religious freedom, consumer law, labor rights, or anything else, do not kid yourself. It will not matter what the statute says. It will matter who is holding the wheel.
Case:Trump v. Slaughter, 25A264 (Sept. 22, 2025) — stay order PDF: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a264_o759.pdf