The Ultimate Legal Fight Over Who Decides the Rules in America
Ninety years after the Supreme Court ruled on regulatory independence, the issue is again at stake.
Illustration: Baptiste Virot for Bloomberg Businessweek
In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, fearing he’d block corporate reforms his administration had designed to help end the Great Depression. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court of the time ruled that the move was an overreach of presidential power. In a unanimous opinion, the justices wrote that Congress intended for the FTC, like other regulatory agencies it had created, to be a nonpartisan body of expert decision-makers, not one the White House controlled.
Emboldened by that ruling, lawmakers went on to create dozens of independent agencies in the intervening years, with the idea that panels of experts would set guidelines for businesses and society shaped by their knowledge in the sciences, economics or other disciplines, not by politics. On Dec. 8, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will revisit the issue to decide whether President Donald Trump had the power to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter this year without cause.