Trump Seeks Supreme Court OK to Fire FTC Commissioner

Rebecca Slaughter, the lone Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, is fighting the Trump administration’s efforts to remove her from the post. (Mattie Neretin/Sipa USA/AP)

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to let him fire the Federal Trade Commission’s Rebecca Slaughter, whose status as commissioner of the agency was reinstated by lower courts in a continuing legal challenge.

The Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an application to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking it to pause Slaughter’s reinstatement during appeal. “The government is likely to succeed on the independent ground that the district court’s reinstatement of respondent exceeded its remedial authority,” the application says.

Trump fired Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, both Democrats, in March. Both filed suit, saying their dismissals were illegal because the FTC is an independent agency, pointing to federal law and Supreme Court precedent. Bedoya has since resigned from the FTC, but Slaughter has continued fighting her removal.

“President Trump acted lawfully when he removed Rebecca Slaughter from the FTC,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “Indeed, the Supreme Court has twice in the last few months confirmed the President’s authority to remove the heads of executive agencies. We look forward to being vindicated for a third time—and hopefully after this ruling, the lower courts will cease their defiance of Supreme Court orders.”

In a divided 2-1 decision on Tuesday, Judges Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the government “has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent.”

Both judges are Obama-era appointees, while Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dissented.

Pointing to Trump’s previous firings of the heads of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission, the Justice Department said Thursday in its application that “the President must be able to remove, at will, members of multimember commissions that exercise substantial executive power.”

It says that Slaughter “should not exercise any executive power, let alone significant rulemaking and enforcement powers” and that the government faces “irreparable harm” from an order that allows her to continue “exercising the executive power.”

Slaughter was appointed to the FTC by Trump in 2o18 and reappointed last year by President Joe Biden for a term that was supposed to run through 2029.

But in March, Trump sent her a letter saying that he was removing her from the FTC, effective immediately, saying that “Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.”

“Amid the efforts by the Trump admin to illegally abolish independent agencies,” Slaughter said on Tuesday, “I’m glad the court has recognized that he is not above the law. I’m eager to get back first thing tomorrow to the work I was entrusted to do on behalf of the American people.”

Tuesday’s appeals court decision upheld an earlier decision by Judge Loren AliKhan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that firing Slaughter was illegal and that she should be reinstated to the FTC.

The appeals court judges cited the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a case that involved the firing of an FTC commissioner without cause, and saying that FTC commissioners could be dismissed only for “cause.”

“Trump’s efforts to remove Slaughter are part of a broader effort to centralize power in the White House, and in doing so increase political control over parts of government that Congress wanted to be independent,” Donald P. Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School, told Barron’s.

“The Humphrey’s Executor case was specifically about the FTC, so the Supreme Court would have to go even further in ignoring past decisions to fire Slaughter.”

Write to Janet H. Cho at janet.cho@dowjones.com