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Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

Back then, Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to provide a blueprint for a Republican presidency. Now Vought is the head of the Office of Management and Budget—which he’s described as “a president’s air-­traffic control system”—and Donald Trump is following Project 2025’s plans to quash any part of the executive branch that doesn’t bend to his will. One key step in that plan is coaxing the Supreme Court to throw out a ruling that has shaped the government for 90 years.

Last week, Trump announced that he was firing two Democratic federal trade commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. The FTC, which enforces antitrust law, has five seats, and no more than three may belong to any party. It is what’s known as an “independent agency” or “independent regulatory agency”—a part of the executive branch whose members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate but, beyond that, are not directed by the White House.

As I write in my forthcoming book about Project 2025, that concept is anathema to the right-wing thinkers in Trumpism’s intellectual clique. They believe that a president should have full control over anyone in the executive branch. “The notion of an independent agency—­whether that’s a flat-­out independent agency” such as the Federal Communications Commission “or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice—­we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Vought told NPR in 2023.

This is not the first time that Trump has moved to fire an official whose job is supposed to be secure, save in cases of misconduct. This includes Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, whose case I described earlier this month; Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who is challenging her dismissal; and the National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was reinstated by a court this month. All of these dismissals appear to plainly violate statutes, but the FTC firings are an even more direct provocation. That’s because the Supreme Court precedent that protects officials at independent agencies specifically refers to a president’s attempt to fire an FTC commissioner in 1933. (Today, the two fired FTC commissioners sued Trump, arguing that the dismissals violated federal law. A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that “the Trump administration operated within its lawful authority” in firing the commissioners.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s power struggle with the Supreme Court is well known, but he also feuded with other officials who opposed his major overhaul of the government. One was William Humphrey, who’d been appointed to the FTC by Calvin Coolidge, a fierce small-government conservative. Roosevelt tried to pressure Humphrey to quit, but he refused, so Roosevelt attempted to fire him—not for any specific cause, but simply because they disagreed on policy.

Humphrey once again refused to acquiesce and sued. He died the following year, but his estate continued to fight the case, taking it to the Supreme Court. For this reason, the case is known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. (Certain officials at Columbia University and the law firm of Paul Weiss could learn from this persistence in the face of adversity and even death.) The court ruled 9–0 against the president in 1935. The justices found that although the FTC was housed in the executive branch, it also served some independent legislative and judicial functions. “Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive,” they wrote, adding, “It is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter’s will.”

Roosevelt was furious—this was one of the Supreme Court decisions that led him to attempt to pack the court two years later—but Humphrey’s Executor became an important pillar of the federal government as we know it for decades. For most of that time, conservatives have viewed Roosevelt’s presidency as an example of the evils of a president with excessive power.

The right is no longer so skeptical about presidential power. Some right-wing thinkers have espoused the “unitary executive theory,” which holds (to oversimplify) that the president should have control over all executive-branch actions. The George W. Bush administration brought this theory into the mainstream. Yet even though the Supreme Court has somewhat narrowed the reach of its 1935 ruling over time, Humphrey’s Executor remains an important limitation on the president’s powers.

Now, however, Trump allies—frustrated by how the checks and balances of independent agencies (among other things) prevented him from enacting much of his agenda during his first presidency—are seeking greater control than any modern president has. For this reason, I argue in my book that Project 2025’s approach is not conservative but self-consciously radical. In Project 2025’s chapter on the FTC, Adam Candeub (now the general counsel of the FCC) writes, “The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later.” In another chapter, the former Justice Department official Gene Hamilton argues, “The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

This may be the purpose the most recent firings serve for the White House. As the Trump administration lines up test cases for the courts, it would only be fitting to try to get the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey’s with a case from the FTC. But if the precedent is overturned, much of the executive branch would be transformed from watchdogs or independent actors into the president’s foot soldiers, raising the risk of tyranny—either of the majority or of the president himself. Having established that independent agencies functioned as parts of the legislative and judicial branches, the unanimous majority in 1935 laid out the principle at work: “The fundamental necessity of maintaining each of the three general departments of government entirely free from the control or coercive influence, direct or indirect, of either of the others, has often been stressed and is hardly open to serious question.”

The court’s logic remains convincing, but its confident assertion that the need for balance is a given has not aged so well.

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