WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday dramatically expanded presidential power, upholding President Donald Trump’s firings of the heads of independent federal agencies with one important exception: the Federal Reserve.
The justices allowed Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her job while she fights the Republican president’s effort to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she has denied.
But other than at the nation’s central bank, with its role of setting interest rates, the court held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals and a 91-year-old decision that had limited executive authority.
With the six conservative justices in the majority, the nine-member court jettisoned its unanimous decision in Humphrey’s Executor that had limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision-making free of political influence.
IN OTHER decisions handed down Monday, justices rejected rejected a Republican-led attack on state laws that allow the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, a target Trump.
Monday’s 5-4 decision leaves in place laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted days after an election, provided they’re postmarked by Election Day.
The outcome spares officials the headache of changing ballot rules just months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
The legal challenge was part of the Republican president’s broader attack on most mail balloting, which he says breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states.
JUSTICES ALSO rejected a push by Trump to throw out a jury’s $5 million finding that he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.
Trump’s lawyers had challenged the judge’s decision to allow testimony from two other women who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago, allegations the Republican president has denied.
Carroll’s lawyers urged the justices to pass on the case, arguing the lower-court decisions were in line with others around the country. The decision comes about two years after the court granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
Ruling expands president’s firing powers
The justices ruled in the case of former Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, whom Trump fired without cause despite a provision of federal law that requires a reason. The logic of the decision extends to other agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump also has fired board members.
The court already had signaled its support for the Trump administration’s position, over the liberals’ objection, by allowing Slaughter and the board members of other agencies to be removed from their jobs even as their legal challenges continued.
No president before Trump had sought to wrest control of the agencies that regulate wide swaths of American life, including nuclear energy, product safety and labor relations. But at arguments in Slaughter’s case in December, the six conservatives, including three appointed by Trump, seemed more concerned about issuing a ruling that would endure than handing too much power to Trump.
Their rhetoric was reminiscent of the presidential immunity case in 2024 that allowed Trump to avoid prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The court is writing a decision “for the ages,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said then.
