Left: President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File). Right: Rebecca Kelly Slaughter (FTC photo).
Reasoning that a 90-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent “controls this case and binds this court,” a 2-1 appellate panel on the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia decided Tuesday to reinstate a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner fired without cause by President Donald Trump and denied the government a stay pending appeal.
While U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard joined the per curiam order, U.S. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao in a lone dissent insisted that the court should have issued a stay “because the government is likely to prevail on the merits of its challenge” of the lower court”s “remarkable injunction.” Millett and Pillard were appointed by former President Barack Obama and Rao was appointed by Trump during his first term.
The majority ordered Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to be reinstated and the government was denied a stay for the simple reason that doing anything else “would be to defy the Supreme Court’s decisions that bind our judgments.”
“That we will not do,” the panel said.
In July, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan barred Trump’s subordinates from taking action to prevent Slaughter, “a rightful Commissioner” of the FTC, from serving out the rest of her seven-year term, which expires in 2029.
AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote that the “facts” of the case “almost identically mirror” those in the Supreme Court case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, where an FTC commissioner’s estate sued for backpay and succeeded in arguing that then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not have the power to fire William Humphrey without cause after policy disagreements.
The 1935 unanimous SCOTUS ruling was clear that “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” were the only causes for firing an FTC commissioner, as Congress expressly intended to insulate the independent fair competition agency from politicization. That same precedent has since been cited by Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook in her lawsuit to block her firing, claiming that mortgage fraud allegations that pre-date her confirmation to office do not amount to “cause” as Humphrey’s Executor defined it.
For the panel, the Trump administration had “no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent.”
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“Specifically, ninety years ago, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Federal Trade Commission Act’s for-cause removal protection for Federal Trade Commissioners,” the order said, referring to the Humphrey’s Executor case. “Over the ensuing decades — and fully informed of the substantial executive power exercised by the Commission—the Supreme Court has repeatedly and expressly left Humphrey’s Executor in place, and so precluded Presidents from removing Commissioners at will. Then just four months ago, the Supreme Court stated that adherence to extant precedent like Humphrey’s Executor controls in resolving stay motions.”
In case the court’s reasoning wasn’t already clear, the majority put it bluntly: “Bucking such precedent is not within this court’s job description.”
Rao, on the other hand, referred to the FTC as a “so-called independent agency” and wrote that SCOTUS has “stayed similar injunctions” in “two virtually identical cases.”
“While it is true the removed officer here is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Supreme Court upheld the removal restriction for such commissioners in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), a stay is nonetheless appropriate,” said Rao. “The Commission unquestionably exercises significant executive power, and the other equities favor the government.”
The lone dissenting judge asserted that even assuming Trump violated the law in removing Slaughter, the government is “likely to succeed” in arguing that of AliKhan “lacked the power” to issue her “remarkable injunction.”
“First, the district court’s purported reinstatement of a removed Executive Branch officer exceeds the traditional equitable powers of an Article III court. Second, the district court clearly erred in its conclusion that Slaughter is irreparably harmed by her removal,” Rao wrote. “And finally, we need not definitively determine whether Slaughter’s removal was lawful, because we must follow the Supreme Court’s conclusion that an injunction reinstating an officer the President has removed harms the government by intruding on the President’s power and responsibility over the Executive Branch.
FTC Commissioners Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya filed suit against Trump in March, claiming that the president removed them without cause — in direct contravention of the law, which says: “Any Commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
“In short, it is bedrock, binding precedent that a President cannot remove an FTC Commissioner without cause,” the plaintiffs’ lawsuit said. “And yet that is precisely what has happened here: President Trump has purported to terminate Plaintiffs as FTC Commissioners, not because they were inefficient, neglectful of their duties, or engaged in malfeasance, but simply because their ‘continued service on the FTC is’ supposedly ‘inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities.'”
“The President’s action is indefensible under governing law,” they added.
The district judge agreed, handing Slaughter a permanent injunction blocking her ouster as “unlawful and without legal effect” at the summary judgment stage of the litigation, deciding the issue of Slaughter’s reinstatement without need for a trial. Now the D.C. Circuit has backed AliKhan.
Because Bedoya formally resigned in June and “voluntarily relinquished the role he was fighting to keep,” the issue as to his firing was declared moot.
