The court protected the Fed's independence in a 5-4 ruling while a separate 6-3 decision overturned a 90-year-old precedent shielding other agency heads
The US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.(Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump's bid to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, while simultaneously giving him broad authority to remove officials at other independent federal agencies. Taken together, the two decisions — each written by Chief Justice John Roberts — amounted to a divided outcome in the administration's broader campaign to bring the federal bureaucracy under presidential control.
A 5-4 majority declined the administration's request to lift a lower court injunction keeping Cook in her position as her legal challenge plays out. Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court's three liberal members. The four remaining conservative justices dissented.
Trump moved against Cook in August 2025, marking the only time in the Fed's history that a sitting president has sought to oust one of the board's governors. He based the action on claims, originating with FHFA Director Bill Pulte, that Cook had misrepresented her primary residence on loan documents four years earlier to secure better mortgage terms. Cook denied the allegations and filed suit, arguing that Trump had not met the "for cause" standard required by the Federal Reserve Act and that she had been given no opportunity to respond to the charges before being dismissed.
In his opinion, Roberts warned that siding with the government on those points would effectively strip away the statutory protection Congress built into the Federal Reserve Act, leaving governors no more secure in their positions than employees serving at the president's pleasure — a departure, he wrote, from both the letter of the law and the country's long tradition of keeping central banking free from political meddling. The court ruled that Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond before her termination.
"This was never about mortgage documents," Cook said in a statement. "It was an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure."
Voting 6-3 along ideological lines in Trump v. Slaughter, the conservative justices struck down Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent under which Congress had been permitted to insulate officials at bodies like the Federal Trade Commission from at-will presidential removal. Humphrey's Executor had underpinned for-cause removal protections across a wide array of independent agencies — more than two dozen in total.
"Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one president," Roberts wrote in the Slaughter ruling. "Subordinates who exercise the president's power are subject to removal by him."
The FTC ruling directly concerns Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, whom Trump fired without cause in March 2025. Agencies beyond the FTC that operate under comparable statutory restrictions on presidential removal could face the same exposure under the ruling's reasoning, NBC News noted. Prior to Monday's ruling, the justices had declined to shield officials at several other bodies — including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission — from Trump's removal efforts as those challenges worked their way through the courts.
The Cook ruling keeps her in place while her case returns to the lower courts for further proceedings. Trump has not nominated a replacement for her seat, which is set to run until 2038.
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