Humphrey's Executor v. United States
Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602, is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that the U.S. Constitution allows Congress to enact laws limiting the ability of the President of the United States to fire the executive officials of an independent agency that is quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial in nature.
The case involved William E. Humphrey, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had fired. Roosevelt had fired Humphrey over their policy disagreements involving economic regulation and the New Deal, even though the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 allowed the president to fire an FTC commissioner only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."
Over the course of the 20th century, Humphrey's Executor came to be viewed as the canonical precedent for the constitutionality of independent agencies in the U.S. federal government. The decision received criticism from some scholars during the latter part of the 20th century who claimed it unconstitutionally limits the powers of the president. The conservative majority Roberts Court has applied the decision by limiting the structural choices Congress may make when designing agencies. During the second Donald Trump presidency, several controversial firings of independent-agency executive officials spawned lawsuits challenging the ongoing validity of Humphrey's Executor. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one of these cases, Trump v. Slaughter, in December 2025.
Background
William Humphrey had been a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission since his appointment in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge, having been reappointed by President Herbert Hoover. Humphrey was an outspoken and controversial FTC commissioner. A conservative Republican, he opposed most of the Commission's antitrust enforcement actions and frequently engaged in personal and political attacks. In public speeches, he argued that the FTC's "old policy of litigation" against American companies had made the Commission "an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury instead of a help to business."Roosevelt, who became President in 1933, disliked Humphrey and viewed him as inadequately supportive of his New Deal agenda. In his first months in office, Roosevelt twice wrote letters to Humphrey asking him to resign because his policies did not align with Roosevelt's own.
Humphrey pushed back against Roosevelt's requests and refused to resign. In October 1933, Roosevelt wrote Humphrey a third letter that simply fired him. Humphrey's dismissal was based solely on his political and ideological differences with Roosevelt, rather than on poor performance or malfeasance. This contravened Section 1 of the FTC Act, which listed only "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" as the reasons a President could remove an FTC commissioner from office.
On February 14, 1934, five months after his firing, Humphrey died of a stroke at age 71. The FTC had stopped paying Humphrey his salary of $10,000 per year upon his dismissal, even though he had continued to come to work at the FTC each day. Samuel Rathbun, the executor of Humphrey's estate, sued the U.S. federal government in the Court of Claims, claiming that Humphrey's firing had been unlawful and that the government therefore owed his estate five months of back pay for the period of time between his firing and his death.
While adjudicating the lawsuit, the Court of Claims issued two certified questions to the U.S. Supreme Court:
- "Do the provisions of section 1 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, stating that 'any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office', restrict or limit the power of the President to remove a commissioner except upon one or more of the causes named?"
- "If the foregoing question is answered in the affirmative, then—If the power of the President to remove a commissioner is restricted or limited as shown by the foregoing interrogatory and the answer made thereto, is such a restriction or limitation valid under the Constitution of the United States?"
Supreme Court
Argument
argued, on behalf of the executor of the Humphrey estate, that the expressio unius rule of statutory construction confirmed the intent of Congress to limit the power of removal to causes enumerated in the statute. The government claimed that this had previously been resolved by the Supreme Court's decision Shurtleff v. United States but this argument failed because the FTC had a very different structure. The government, citing Myers v. United States, also made a constitutional argument.Decision
On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of Rathbun and Humphrey's estate. In an opinion written by Justice George Sutherland, the Court ruled that it was not a violation of the Constitution for the FTC Act to limit the power of the President to remove FTC commissioners only to situations involving "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office".The Court’s opinion gave four main reasons for its ruling. First, the Court said that when Congress had created the FTC in 1914, it had intended the Commission to be a federal government agency that was independent and non-partisan. The opinion described the FTC as an agency that was supposed to be free from control by the President and the executive branch, except for the initial appointments of its commissioners by the President:
Second, the Court said that Congress had intended FTC commissioners to be experts in business and industry who would "exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts" while being insulated from politics. It compared the FTC to the Interstate Commerce Commission, which Congress had created in 1887 as an independent overseer of practices in the railroad industry.
The Court's third and fourth reasons were that the function and duties of the FTC were "neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative". The Court said the FTC did not perform the traditional executive-branch function of enforcing the law, but instead was more like a legislative or judicial body. It reasoned that because the FTC did not enforce the law, the President did not need unfettered removal power over FTC commissioners in order to fulfill his duty under Article II of the U.S. Constitution to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".
The Court concluded by ruling that the removal restrictions in Section 1 of the FTC Act were constitutional, meaning that Myers v. United States did not prevent Congress from structuring an agency to be independent of executive control:
Analysis
Historical context
Humphrey's Executor occurred at a moment in American history when tensions between the President and the Supreme Court were at an all-time high. The Court issued the decision on the same day as A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, a historic decision that struck down a key piece of Roosevelt's New Deal agenda—the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933—as unconstitutional. Legal scholars often view Humphrey's Executor in the context of the Court's "unprecedented but short-lived" effort in the mid-1930s to rein in the power of the President, which eventually resulted in Roosevelt's unsuccessful attempt to pack the Court.At the time of the decision, moreover, the FTC's powers and authority were limited. The FTC had no formal policymaking powers in the mid-1930s. It could only adjudicate individual disputes and give information and advice to Congress.
Criticism
Although Humphrey's Executor became the legal basis for accepting the existence of independent agencies in the U.S. federal government, some legal scholars have criticized the constitutional reasoning of the decision. In a widely cited Columbia Law Review article published in 1984, the American legal scholar Peter L. Strauss criticized the Court's decision for failing to consider whether it may have created major constitutional problems:While the reasoning of Humphrey's Executor has been described as functionalist by legal scholars, the label is contested. Justice Scalia's notable dissent in Morrison v. Olson said Sutherland's opinion "at least had the decency formally to observe the constitutional principle that the President had to be the repository of all executive power".
Subsequent developments
The Supreme Court narrowed Humphrey's Executor in Seila Law v. CFPB. The Chief Justice wrote that the executive power "belongs to the President generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead" and ruled that the agency's structure violated the separation of powers. Seila Law left unresolved questions about whether the Humphrey's Executor exception would be overturned.Overturning Humphrey's Executor was seen as a key point in Project 2025 by the conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, and which was put into motion within the second presidency of Donald Trump in 2025. Several of Trump's early steps as president was to dismiss heads or commissioners of independent agencies, leading to lawsuits challenging these dismissals under Humphrey's Executor. On May 22, 2025, in a 6-3 unsigned order in response to an emergency appeal from Donald Trump, the Supreme Court stayed the reinstatement of two independent regulators, Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and chair Cathy A. Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, pending further review in lower courts. The unsigned order stated that "because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents." However, the Court did not rule on the merits, with the order stating "The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power. But we do not ultimately decide in this posture whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within such a recognized exception; that question is better left for resolution after full briefing and argument."
The decision was sharply criticized by Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that the ruling had effectively repealed Humphrey's Executor "by fiat", and that "nowhere is short-circuiting our deliberative process less appropriate than when the ruling requested would disrespect—by either overturning or narrowing—one of this Court's longstanding precedents". Kagan also criticized the order's call-out to separate the Federal Reserve Board from other independent agencies, saying that this board's independence "rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on — which is to say it rests largely on Humphrey's."
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court similarly stayed an injunction that had blocked President Trump's firing of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, an FTC commissioner, while the case was litigated. The court accepted the case on September 22, 2025, to hear the case before judgment from lower courts in December 2025, over dissent from justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, with oral arguments held December 8, 2025.