Supreme Court expands Trump’s power over independent agencies

The Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump sweeping new authority over roughly two dozen multi-member agencies on Monday, ruling 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter and overruling Humphrey’s Executor, the 91-year-old precedent that had limited the president’s power to remove members of the Federal Trade Commission. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in a 49-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The ruling reached beyond Rebecca Slaughter’s own job. The FTC was designed with five commissioners, no more than three from one party, and seven-year terms, all meant to keep the agency at some distance from the White House while it handled rulemaking, enforcement and adjudicatory work. Slaughter had been appointed during Trump’s first term and renominated by President Joe Biden in 2023, and the White House removed her effective immediately last year. The court separately rejected Trump’s attempt to immediately fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, leaving the central bank in a different legal posture even as the broader decision widened presidential control over agencies Congress had intended to stand apart.

That same day, weather officials warned of a different kind of expanding risk. The National Weather Service forecast a potentially historic heat wave across the central and eastern United States, moving eastward through the July 4 holiday weekend, with afternoon temperatures in the 90s and low 100s Fahrenheit, heat indices of 105 to 110 degrees in several places, and overnight lows that may only fall into the 70s. New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis are among the cities most exposed.

The danger falls hardest on older adults, infants and children, pregnant women, people with chronic conditions, people without air conditioning, outdoor workers, athletes, people experiencing homelessness and low-income residents who have less ability to get to cooling or stay there. Heat.gov and the CDC urge people to prepare ahead of time, use cooling centers, check heat and air-quality alerts, and watch for signs of overheating as dangerous heat spreads across the lower Great Lakes, mid-Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and the Southeast, with critical wildfire conditions also persisting in parts of the Southwest and Great Basin.