In part of a flurry of end-of-term activity, the Supreme Court in late June overturned a 90-year-old precedent and held that the president may remove the leaders of most independent agencies at will. CCI editorial director Jennifer L. Gaskin examines what Trump v Slaughter changes for the companies those agencies regulate and why the scariest effects are likely to live in the realm of enforcement.
For nearly a century, the agencies that regulate American business shared a structural feature that had more to do with how they functioned than the substance of their rules: The people in charge could only be removed for cause and not because they had a policy disagreement with the White House. Independent bodies under the executive branch (like the SEC, Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board) were staffed by a typically bipartisan slate of commissioners on fixed, staggered terms. A president who disagreed with their views pretty much had to wait out the opposing party’s members. This created natural friction — a minority voice in the room that did not answer solely to the White House — and companies could rely on a certain rhythm and deliberation when adjusting their compliance programs in the face of new rules or enforcement priorities.
On June 29, the Supreme Court removed that friction. In Trump v Slaughter, a 6-3 majority overruled a 90-year-old precedent and held that the president may remove the leaders of most independent agencies at will, without cause, pulling them under direct White House control and raising the specter of more overt politicization of agency rulemaking and enforcement powers. The Federal Reserve was carved out as a historical exception in a separate ruling (Trump v Cook); the FTC, NLRB, SEC and roughly two dozen other agencies were not.
Observers who disagree sharply on whether the ruling is good for the country tend to agree on the most immediate upshot: Rulemaking will stay slow, but enforcement is another matter — which investigations open, which quietly close, where an agency spends its finite attention.
“With the threat of removal at any time hanging over folks’ heads, they’re much more likely to take direction from the White House in terms of the priorities and where they put their resources,” said Misha Tseytlin, a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke who has argued before the Supreme Court.
More predictable or less?
The lion’s share of legal observers so far have suggested that the only certain outcome of Slaughter will be uncertainty: sharper swings in enforcement priorities from one administration to the next, agency policy that lurches rather than drifts, and — paired with the end of Chevron deference — a fresh wave of litigation over what agencies are still empowered to do.
But Tseytlin takes a different tack: The ruling, he argues, may make agencies easier to read or at least more scheduled in terms of when companies need to make those reads. An independent agency’s posture used to move in the president’s general direction but on its own timeline — slowed by fixed terms and checked by a protected minority, so most agencies didn’t exactly mirror the White House’s timing. An agency’s stance now aligns directly with the president’s, and can be anticipated the same way companies have long anticipated the more nakedly political agencies.
“It should almost make it more predictable, because now you can handicap what you expect,” Tseytlin told CCI. “If you see whatever happens in November of a presidential year, you pretty much handicap how the NLRB is going to act, the same way you’re currently handicapping how EPA is going to act.” The whole ship of the executive branch, as he put it, now moves together — one rubric instead of two.
But predictability holds better for rules than for enforcement. Rules still will advance through notice-and-comment, face review in court and often come with phase-in periods. Companies have months or even years to plan. Investigations don’t work that way; they announce themselves not in proposed rulemaking but in subpoenas. The choice of whom to pursue, and whom to spare, is discretionary and largely unreviewable.
Recent EEOC actions put a fine point on this. Under its Trump-appointed chair, Andrea Lucas, the agency has reoriented enforcement toward claims on behalf of white men. It opened an investigation into Nike’s diversity hiring goals, sued a Coca-Cola bottler over a networking event for women employees and secured a $500,000 settlement from a Planned Parenthood affiliate over its DEI practices. Former officials have described Lucas as personally steering the docket toward the administration’s priorities to a degree they call unprecedented for an agency chair, and reporting has surfaced an internal “priority” case list chosen partly for the attention it would draw. Meanwhile, the agency has dropped cases it had been pursuing on behalf of transgender and nonbinary workers.
Regulatory Compliance in a Post-Chevron World: Fasten Your Seatbelts
The cracks are already showing. A U.S. District Court in Texas, less than a week after the Supreme Court issued its Loper Bright decision, cited the ruling in partially striking down the FTC’s controversial ban on noncompete agreements in employment.
Read moreDetailsAt the pleasure of the president
There is a quieter consequence, too, on the rulemaking side. When a president can remove commissioners at will, the opposition-party seats will probably just not get filled, as is currently the case at the FTC, which has operated with a bare Republican majority while its Democratic seats sit empty since the firings that helped produce Slaughter. But dissenting commissioners do more than just object; they build a record: The objections a minority lodges against rules often become the roadmap for lawsuits that later challenge the rules. When the DC Circuit struck down the SEC’s proxy-access rule in 2011, it faulted the agency on the very cost-benefit grounds the two dissenting commissioners had pressed. Empty seats mean fewer such dissents, which may let rules pass more smoothly but leave them more exposed later, tested only once they reach a court that no longer defers to the agency’s reading.
For compliance teams, none of this argues for waiting to see how things shake out. The through-line across the legal commentary is that programs built for a single administration’s posture are the ones most likely to be caught out. Here’s what that looks like:
- Comply with the rules as written, not the enforcement priorities of the moment. A favorable climate is not a safe harbor; conduct an agency declines to pursue today remains unlawful if it was unlawful, and a later administration can revive it.
- Read the signals between actions. With enforcement now moving in concert with the White House, a chair’s speeches, public statements and priority-setting are leading indicators of where resources will go — often well before a subpoena arrives.
- Document the “why” behind contested programs. For anything a future administration might read differently — the whole DEI category being a clear example — a contemporaneous record of the business and legal rationale is what a program will lean on if the enforcement wind reverses.
This decision reaches commissioners as readily as agency heads: The fired members at issue were not chairs. What it pointedly did not settle is how far down the removal power runs. The majority left open the status of administrative law judges, career civil servants and non-Article III judges; for now the officials most exposed are the Senate-confirmed leaders at the top, not the staff who do the day-to-day work. That unsettled boundary in part animated a fiery dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who warned that the majority had traded a workable arrangement for a theory with no clear stopping point, one that “promises to unleash only chaos.”
The court’s majority in Slaughter frames this as accountability: agencies answering, through the president, to the voters. Whatever its constitutional merits, for the companies those agencies regulate it lands as something more practical. Rules won’t change on a dime, but the people in these agencies deciding what corporate behavior draws red flags now serve unquestionably at the president’s pleasure, and the surest bet is that the choices agency personnel make will also aim to please POTUS.
Jennifer L. Gaskin is editorial director of Corporate Compliance Insights. A newsroom-forged journalist, she began her career in community newspapers. Her first assignment was covering a county council meeting where the main agenda item was whether the clerk's office needed a new printer (it did). Starting with her early days at small local papers, Jennifer has worked as a reporter, photographer, copy editor, page designer, manager and more. She joined the staff of Corporate Compliance Insights in 2021 and also hosts the CCI-produced podcast "Queering Compliance." 
