The Removal Power Explained
The removal power is the president's authority to fire the officers who run federal agencies — and the fight over how far that power reaches is one of the central battles in constitutional law today.
Every president inherits a federal bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them can only be fired for specific reasons — poor performance, misconduct, violation of law. That's civil service protection, and it exists to keep the government from being purged and replaced every four years. But at the top of every agency sits a small group of political appointees, and the question of whether the president can fire them — freely, for any reason, or only for cause — is not a routine personnel question. It's a constitutional one, and it has become the center of gravity in the modern fight over how the administrative state should be structured.
The Constitution doesn't actually say. Article II says the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and vests "the executive Power" in the president. The removal power is inferred from those provisions, not spelled out in them. That inference has been fought over for more than two centuries. In Myers v. United States (1926), the Supreme Court read the Constitution to give the president near-total removal authority over executive officers. In Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), the Court carved out an exception for the leaders of "independent agencies" — bodies like the Federal Trade Commission that Congress had designed to operate outside direct presidential control. That exception held for ninety years. In June 2026, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey's Executor and returned removal law to something much closer to what Myers originally set out. For-cause protection at independent agencies is no longer the law. The Federal Reserve is the exception the Court carved out on historical grounds; almost every other independent agency now operates under at-will removal.
The consequences are far-reaching and still unfolding. A president can now direct policy at the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, the NLRB, and dozens of other agencies with a phone call — because the officers running them serve at the president's pleasure. Enforcement priorities can pivot mid-case. Bipartisan commission structures Congress designed can be reduced to single-party bodies simply by firing the minority-party commissioners. What Slaughter did not decide — but strongly signaled — is whether administrative law judges retain their own tenure protections, since the Merit Systems Protection Board that historically enforced those protections is itself vulnerable to the same reasoning. And Justice Gorsuch's concurrence flagged a further wave: Congress delegated enormous power to agencies on the assumption those agencies would be independent, and now that assumption is gone. What Congress bargained for is not what Congress got.
In this episode, we explain what the removal power is, why it matters, and how the current fight developed. We trace the history from Myers through Humphrey's Executor, cover the more recent cases that gradually narrowed independent-agency protection — Free Enterprise Fund, Seila Law, Collins — and examine what the removal power fight tells us about the deeper question underneath it: who actually controls the modern administrative state.
This episode was recorded before Trump v. Slaughter was decided. For our full analysis of the 2026 decision that overruled Humphrey's Executor and ended for-cause protection for most independent agencies, see the Slaughter Learn page.
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What We Cover
- What the removal power is and why it matters — the difference between civil service protection for career employees and the constitutional fight over political appointees
- The Constitution's silence on removal, and why the answer had to be inferred from Article II's "take care" and vesting clauses
- Myers v. United States (1926) and the original broad reading of presidential removal authority
- Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) and the creation of the "independent agency" exception that structured the administrative state for ninety years
- The gradual narrowing of independent-agency protection through Free Enterprise Fund (2010), Seila Law (2020), and Collins (2021)
- Why the double-shield structure protecting administrative law judges — good-cause removal reviewed by the Merit Systems Protection Board — has been on precarious constitutional ground for years
- What at-will removal looks like in practice: enforcement priorities that pivot mid-case, bipartisan commissions reduced to single-party bodies, and what democratic accountability actually requires
- Why the removal-power fight is really a fight about who controls the modern administrative state — Congress, the courts, or the president
Full Transcript
[Transcript]
Related Guides
- Trump v. Slaughter Explained: The Case That Ended Independent Agencies — The 2026 decision that resolved the removal-power fight this page describes. It overrules Humphrey's Executor, ends for-cause protection at most independent agencies, and reshapes how much control the president has over federal agencies.
- Independent vs. Executive Agencies — The distinction that removal-power doctrine has largely eliminated. Independence used to run on for-cause protection; after Slaughter, it runs on historical tradition, which effectively means the Fed.
- Who Decides: ALJs vs. Non-ALJs — Removal doctrine has now reached agency heads. The next question is whether administrative law judges — the officers deciding hundreds of thousands of individual cases each year — retain their own tenure protections when the enforcement mechanism behind those protections has itself been weakened.