Trump Just Got the Supreme Court to Do Project 2025 for Him

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that for more than 90 years let Congress shield the heads of independent agencies from being fired at a president’s whim. The vote was 6–3. In a companion case handed down the same hour, the court spared the Federal Reserve, the one exception it had long flagged, and let board member Lisa Cook keep her seat by a 5–4 vote.

It will be called a landmark, and it is. It should not be called a surprise. The position the court adopted was written down three years ago, in Project 2025, and the lawyer who wrote that document’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent the past year running the FCC, carrying it out.

A year before the ruling, the mechanics were tested on officials the president had already removed. Gwynne Wilcox sat on the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris on the Merit Systems Protection Board, and both statutes allowed removal only for cause, after notice and a hearing. Neither received any. In May 2025, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket and without full argument, let both removals stand and never mentioned Humphrey’s. Both boards lost their quorums and could no longer act. The merit board alone reported 20,335 pending appeals that year, four times its usual load, filed by workers swept out in the mass terminations, and with Harris gone it could decide none of them. An agency does not have to be abolished to be neutralized. It needs only to be emptied of the people authorized to act.

None of it was improvised. Project 2025’s Justice Department chapter had instructed the next administration to take the formal position that Humphrey’s “violates the Constitution’s separation of powers,” that the president may fire the heads of independent agencies at will. Within months, the administration made that argument, in Wilcox, then in Trump v. Slaughter, the Federal Trade Commission case the court has now decided.

On Monday, the justices finished the sentence the Project 2025 blueprint had begun. Writing for six members of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts held that the FTC’s for-cause protection violates the separation of powers. Its reasoning reached back to the Decision of 1789 and the removal cases that followed. The Constitution vests the executive power in one president, and officers who wield that power must answer to him, which means he must be able to remove them. The FTC, the court said, “unquestionably exercises executive power,” its work the very essence of executing the law. Humphrey’s, which in 1935 had called the same agency’s functions quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial, was “a result in search of a rationale.” So the court let it go.

Read more The Mail-Ballot Case Squeaked By

It drew exactly one line it would not cross. By 5–4, with the chief justice and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices who had just dissented in the FTC case, the court refused to let the president remove Cook from the Federal Reserve. The immediate ground was process. The president had purported to fire her three days after a social media accusation of mortgage fraud, without the notice and chance to respond that her statute requires, so she keeps her seat while the case returns to the lower courts. The court did not stop there. It defended the central bank itself, tracing the Fed’s independence to the founding-era tradition that began with Alexander Hamilton and the First and Second banks of the United States, and holding that protection consistent with the Constitution. To read the Fed’s for-cause shield as at-will employment, the chief justice wrote, would be “an interpretive leap out of step with” the nation’s tradition of central banking kept free of politics. The one institution spared is the one both the authors of the Project 2025 blueprint and the court’s own precedent had marked as the exception all along. Even the limit was written down in Project 2025.

Everywhere else, removal-based independence ends at once. Its logic reaches the labor board, the merit board, and the trade commission and ratifies the removals the court had already waved through at the consumer-product, surface-transportation, and employment agencies. An agency that cannot keep an official the president wants gone is an agency that answers to him.

Congress had written for-cause removal into these statutes for a reason it stated plainly, to place certain expert, bipartisan bodies beyond the reach of any single president. Dissenting in the Wilcox order last year, Justice Elena Kagan described those agencies, the NLRB, the FTC, and the Fed among them, as the product of “one basic vision.” In dissent on Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, objected that the court had read that vision out of the statutes Congress wrote.

There is a name for a capture that proceeds this way, by personnel and procedure, each step defensible on its own, the whole amounting to control. It accumulates as a sequence rather than arriving as a coup. The rationale is supplied in advance, the loyalists installed, the watchdogs removed, the courts asked to bless the result. The last step has now been taken.

The statutes will stay on the books, and the commissions will keep their letterhead and their seals. What changes is the answer to a single question, whom the people inside them work for, and the court assembled to revise these agencies has now answered it in the place of the Congress that built them. The administration calls the result accountability.

Read more Elena Kagan Just Bolstered the Fourth Amendment in a Badly Needed Way