Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire, at least for now, a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. A federal district judge in Washington, D.C., had ordered Trump to reinstate Rebecca Slaughter, who was originally nominated in 2018 by Trump to serve a seven-year term and then nominated to serve a second term by then-President Joe Biden. But Roberts granted the government’s request for an administrative stay – a temporary pause to give the justices time to consider the Trump administration’s plea to block the order by U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan while litigation continues in the lower courts.
As is common with administrative stays, Roberts did not provide any explanation for his order. But the order suggests that a majority of the justices may be skeptical of the continued vitality of the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, upholding a federal law that only allows FTC commissioners to be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The dispute began in March 2025, when both Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, who was also nominated by Biden, were notified, in an email on Trump’s behalf, that they had been removed from the FTC because their “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” The email did not indicate that they had been fired for any of the reasons that would give Trump cause to do so under federal law.
