Humphrey's Executor v. United States

Based on Wikipedia: Humphrey's Executor v. United States

The Commissioner Who Wouldn't Quit

William Humphrey was a man who simply refused to leave. After President Franklin Roosevelt fired him from the Federal Trade Commission in 1933, Humphrey kept showing up to work anyway. Every single day, he walked into the FTC offices as if nothing had happened, even though the government had stopped paying his salary. He did this for five months straight, until he died of a stroke.

His stubbornness outlasted his life. The legal battle over whether Roosevelt had the right to fire him would reshape American government in ways that still matter ninety years later—and that have become explosively controversial in the present day.

What Makes an Agency "Independent"?

To understand why this case matters, you need to understand a peculiar feature of the American government that doesn't quite fit the neat civics textbook division of legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Independent agencies are government bodies that exist in a constitutional gray zone. They're created by Congress and their leaders are appointed by the President, but they're designed to operate with some insulation from direct presidential control. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve—these agencies regulate vast swaths of American economic life, yet they're structured to resist the kind of direct orders that a President can give to, say, the Secretary of State or the Attorney General.

The key mechanism for this independence? Restrictions on firing. If a President can dismiss an agency head at any time for any reason, that official will inevitably feel pressure to do what the President wants. But if the President can only remove someone for specific causes—like incompetence or corruption—then the official has more freedom to follow the law and their own expert judgment, even if the President disagrees.

This distinction might sound technical. It is anything but. It goes to the heart of how power works in a democracy.

The Clash Between Roosevelt and Humphrey

Franklin Roosevelt swept into the presidency in 1933 amid the Great Depression, armed with an ambitious agenda called the New Deal. He wanted to transform the relationship between government and the economy, and he needed loyal people throughout the federal bureaucracy to make it happen.

William Humphrey was decidedly not loyal. A conservative Republican appointed by Calvin Coolidge in 1925 and reappointed by Herbert Hoover, Humphrey had spent years loudly opposing most of what the FTC was supposed to do. He gave public speeches arguing that the Commission's enforcement of antitrust laws had made it "an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury instead of a help to business." He was confrontational, ideological, and utterly unwilling to support Roosevelt's vision.

Roosevelt tried diplomacy first. He wrote Humphrey two letters asking him to resign, explaining candidly:

You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence.

Humphrey refused. He had been appointed to a seven-year term, and he intended to serve it.

In October 1933, Roosevelt stopped asking. He sent a third letter that simply informed Humphrey he was fired. No allegations of misconduct or incompetence—just a straightforward acknowledgment that they disagreed about policy, and Roosevelt wanted someone else.

There was just one problem. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, the law that created the FTC, specified that commissioners could only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Policy disagreement wasn't on the list.

A Dead Man's Lawsuit

When Humphrey died in February 1934, his estate had a claim: five months of unpaid salary, amounting to ten thousand dollars—equivalent to about two hundred forty-three thousand dollars today. The executor of his estate, Samuel Rathbun, sued the federal government, arguing that because Roosevelt's firing was illegal, Humphrey had remained a commissioner until his death and was owed back pay.

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which had to answer two fundamental questions. First, did the FTC Act actually limit the President's power to fire commissioners? And second, if it did, was such a limitation constitutional?

Both questions mattered enormously. If Congress could restrict the President's removal power, it could create entire realms of government that operated beyond presidential control. If it couldn't, then every agency head in Washington served entirely at the President's pleasure, regardless of what any statute said.

The Court's Surprising Unanimity

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Humphrey's estate. Nine to zero. Roosevelt's firing had been illegal.

What makes this decision remarkable is who wrote it. Justice George Sutherland was one of the "Four Horsemen," the bloc of conservative justices who spent much of the 1930s striking down Roosevelt's New Deal programs. In fact, on the very same day the Court issued Humphrey's Executor, it also decided A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, which demolished a centerpiece of the New Deal—the National Industrial Recovery Act—as unconstitutional.

So here was a conservative Court, hostile to Roosevelt's agenda, simultaneously limiting his power to fire officials and striking down his economic programs. The coincidence was not lost on Roosevelt, who would later try (and fail) to "pack" the Court by adding additional justices.

The Logic of Independence

Sutherland's opinion rested on a crucial distinction. The President, under Article II of the Constitution, has a duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This means the President must have control over officials who execute the law—who enforce it, who carry it out.

But the FTC, Sutherland wrote, wasn't really executing anything. Its functions were "predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative." The Commission investigated, made rules, and adjudicated disputes. It acted more like a specialized court or a mini-legislature than like an enforcement arm of the President.

This mattered because Congress had created the FTC to be something specific: a body of experts, insulated from politics, able to make decisions based on evidence and specialized knowledge rather than partisan pressure. Sutherland quoted extensively from the legislative history:

The debates in both houses demonstrate that the prevailing view was that the commission was not to be "subject to anybody in the government, but ... only to the people of the United States"; free from "political domination or control."

The Court compared the FTC to the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1887 to regulate railroads—another body designed to bring expert judgment to complex technical questions without political interference.

The key constitutional principle, as Sutherland saw it, was almost common sense: "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."

If you can be fired at any moment for any reason, you're not really independent. You're subordinate.

The Tension with Myers

Nine years before Humphrey's Executor, the Supreme Court had decided a case called Myers v. United States that seemed to point in the opposite direction. In Myers, the Court ruled that the President had broad constitutional authority to remove executive officers, even when Congress tried to limit that power.

How could both decisions be right?

Sutherland's answer was to distinguish between types of officers. Myers involved a postmaster—someone performing a purely executive function, carrying out the President's policies. The FTC commissioners were different. They weren't executing presidential policy; they were exercising quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative powers that Congress had delegated to them.

This distinction created a framework that would govern American administrative law for decades. Officers performing core executive functions serve at the President's pleasure. Officers performing quasi-judicial or quasi-legislative functions in independent agencies can be protected from at-will removal.

Why This Still Matters

After 1935, Humphrey's Executor became the foundation for an enormous edifice of independent agencies. The Securities and Exchange Commission, created in 1934. The Federal Communications Commission, reorganized in 1934. The National Labor Relations Board, created in 1935. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in 2010. All of these agencies were designed with removal protections modeled on the FTC's, and all of them derived their constitutional legitimacy from Humphrey's Executor.

But the decision has always had critics. Some legal scholars have pointed out a fundamental tension in the Court's reasoning. The Constitution creates three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—and assigns specific powers to each. Where exactly do independent agencies fit?

Sutherland's opinion says the FTC is simultaneously "in both the legislative and the judicial branches, because of the functions it performs." But can an agency really be in two branches at once? Isn't there something strange about a government body that's "subject only to the people of the United States"—meaning, apparently, subject to none of the three branches the Constitution actually establishes?

The legal scholar Peter Strauss, in a widely cited 1984 article, put the objection sharply: the Court "did not pause to examine how a purpose to create a body... apparently, beyond control of the constitutionally defined branches of government—could itself be sustained under the Constitution."

The Modern Assault on Independence

For decades, these theoretical objections remained largely academic. Independent agencies continued to operate, and the courts continued to uphold their structures. But starting in the late twentieth century, a movement gained strength in conservative legal circles to reconsider Humphrey's Executor.

The intellectual foundation was a doctrine called the "unitary executive theory"—the idea that the Constitution vests all executive power in the President personally, and that any arrangement dividing or limiting that power is constitutionally suspect. Under this view, independent agencies represent an unconstitutional intrusion on presidential authority. If an agency exercises executive power, the President must be able to control it fully, including through unrestricted removal of its leaders.

Justice Antonin Scalia became the most prominent judicial voice for this position. In his famous dissent in Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 case upholding the independent counsel statute, Scalia argued that Sutherland's opinion in Humphrey's Executor, whatever its flaws, "at least had the decency formally to observe the constitutional principle that the President had to be the repository of all executive power."

The Supreme Court began narrowing Humphrey's Executor without overruling it. In 2020, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Court struck down the CFPB's structure because its single director was removable only for cause. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that executive power "belongs to the President" and "generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

But Seila Law left the core of Humphrey's Executor standing—at least for now.

The 2025 Crisis

When Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, his administration moved quickly to test the limits of Humphrey's Executor. Drawing on recommendations from Project 2025, a policy blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation, Trump began firing heads and commissioners of independent agencies early in his second term.

The firings sparked immediate litigation. Officials at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board challenged their dismissals, arguing that Humphrey's Executor protected them from removal without cause. Lower courts initially agreed and ordered them reinstated.

On May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court intervened. In an unsigned six-to-three order, the Court stayed the reinstatements—meaning the fired officials would remain out of their jobs while the legal challenges continued. The order's language was revealing:

Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.

The Court emphasized that it wasn't issuing a final ruling. It was just saying that the government was "likely to show" that the NLRB and MSPB "exercise considerable executive power"—and therefore might not qualify for the independent-agency exception.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a blistering dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She accused the majority of effectively repealing Humphrey's Executor "by fiat"—through an emergency stay rather than a full decision after briefing and argument. She noted acidly that the majority's order seemed to carve out a special exemption for the Federal Reserve, even though its independence "rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on."

In September 2025, the Court agreed to hear a direct challenge to the FTC's removal protections in a case called Trump v. Slaughter. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, an FTC commissioner fired by President Trump, was fighting her dismissal. The Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of hearing the case before the lower courts had finished with it. Oral arguments were held in December 2025.

What's Really at Stake

The fight over Humphrey's Executor is not just a legal technicality. It's a fundamental disagreement about what kind of government the United States should have.

On one side is the vision that independent agencies were designed to serve: government by experts, insulated from the political winds, able to make decisions based on evidence and specialized knowledge. Under this view, some questions—how to regulate financial markets, how to manage telecommunications, how to ensure workplace safety—are too technical and too important to be subject to the partisan pressures of each four-year election cycle. Continuity, expertise, and independence from political interference are features, not bugs.

On the other side is the vision of the unitary executive: a President who is fully accountable to the voters for everything the executive branch does. Under this view, independent agencies represent a dangerous fourth branch of government, exercising vast power without democratic accountability. If the President can't control these agencies, voters can't hold anyone responsible for what they do. The solution is to ensure that all executive power flows from the President, who alone faces the voters.

Both visions have deep roots in American political thought. Both have serious arguments in their favor. And as of late 2025, the Supreme Court appears poised to choose between them.

The Man Behind the Case

It's worth pausing to consider the irony of William Humphrey's legacy. He was, by all accounts, an obstinate ideologue who used his position to obstruct the very agency he served. His public attacks on FTC enforcement made him a thorn in the side of anyone who believed in robust antitrust policy. Roosevelt didn't fire him for being inefficient or corrupt—he fired him for being a political opponent who happened to hold a position of power.

And yet this unpleasant man, who refused to leave even after his salary was cut off, who kept coming to work out of pure stubbornness, became the symbol of governmental independence. His name adorns a case that established the constitutional foundation for expert agencies operating beyond presidential control.

Whether that foundation survives the current constitutional moment remains to be seen. But whatever happens, Humphrey's Executor will remain a reminder that the most consequential legal principles sometimes emerge from the most personal of conflicts—a President who wanted someone gone, and a commissioner who simply would not leave.