Is it controversial for a president to actually run the executive branch?
It’s not, as long as a Democrat is president. It only became controversial when a Republican is in charge.
The Supreme Court recently confirmed that President Trump has every right to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.
The New York Times wailed as if democracy had collapsed. In reality, the decision simply reaffirmed that the president is in charge of the executive branch.
The Left clings to a dusty 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which concocted the notion the FTC can defy presidents with zero accountability because it is an “independent agency” with a quasi-legislative function. That doctrine was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now. The Founders didn’t design a government of nameless regulators — they designed one where voters elect a president to make decisions and take responsibility for them.
The Supreme Court has been steadily dismantling this legal fiction in cases like Seila Law v. CFPB and Collins v. Yellen. Now, Trump is simply finishing the job, restoring constitutional order and accountability back to Washington, D.C.
It’s not exactly a secret that the Biden FTC was begging for a cleanup. Under Lina Khan, the agency became a taxpayer-funded think tank for socialism-lite economics. It scrapped the consumer welfare standard — the standard which said the antitrust police would only intervene if businesses harmed everyday Americans — that guided antitrust law for nearly half a century, replacing it with a new vague operating “standard” that gave the FTC authority to stop “concerning” activity before it started.
Your three-year-old nephew is the one that’s supposed to make up the rules of the game on the fly to suit his interests, not the nation’s most important consumer protection agency. But that’s exactly what the Biden FTC did.
Instead of protecting consumers, Khan’s FTC launched baseless cases and bullied businesses that never harmed anyone, misusing Section 5 of the FTC Act — the FTC’s power to challenge anti-competitive activity — as a blank check to invent new law out of thin air.
Take the FTC’s now defunct noncompete rule. Noncompete agreements are common in the private sector — they prevent employees who leave a company from immediately jumping to a direct competitor and taking trade secrets or client relationships with them. They’ve existed for centuries and are governed by state law, not Washington bureaucrats.
However, under Biden, the FTC claimed it could ban every noncompete clause in America, covering roughly 30 million contracts — from software engineers to sandwich-shop managers. It would have nullified private contracts overnight, ignoring the fact that Congress never gave the FTC that authority. Ferguson rightly called it a “patently obvious” illegal rule, and upon assuming his position this year, he quickly stopped it cold.
Then there’s the Biden FTC’s war against pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — the companies American businesses hire to bulk purchase drugs and use their bargaining power to demand rebates from the drug companies, driving down the overall cost of medicines.
No one’s saying the PBM industry is perfect; a handful of firms have been rightly criticized for opaque pricing and slow rebate pass-throughs. But instead of addressing those narrow issues, Biden’s FTC tried to turn the entire PBM model into a foil. It accused PBMs of “unfair competition,” claiming they shun “cheaper” drugmakers — even though the FTC’s own complaint couldn’t name a single patient who paid more because of it.
This logic is upside down. It’s like saying a $20,000 car is somehow “cheaper” than a $25,000 car that comes with a $10,000 rebate. The FTC ignored this logic and used the same unchecked Section 5 authority that Lina Khan stretched beyond recognition to do Big Pharma a political favor and pin the blame for high drug costs elsewhere.
And perhaps the most absurd example: the FTC’s blockade of the JetBlue–Spirit merger. The agency claimed the merger would harm consumers, but the result was Spirit’s bankruptcy and fewer flight options for everyone. This month, even Delta’s CEO, one of Spirit’s competitors, admitted the FTC’s case was unjustified. When your rivals are saying you’ve gone too far, you’ve really lost the plot.
Trump’s FTC chief, Andrew Ferguson, is restoring sanity one case at a time. A constitutional lawyer and former solicitor general, Ferguson has been a wrecking ball to Biden-era overreach.
More reforms are coming. But let’s be clear: none of this would be possible if Trump hadn’t fired the commissioners who turned the FTC into an ideological circus.
The media would rather talk about Trump’s “power grab” than the Biden’s FTC lawbreaking. But that’s exactly what happened. The Biden FTC exceeded its mandate, ignored precedent, and tried to rewrite the law by bureaucratic fiat. Ferguson said as much when he tore down their noncompete scheme.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that Trump might “extinguish” agency independence. False. The only thing he’s extinguishing is unaccountable power.
Kudos to Trump for rightfully assuming his power to clean up the four-year mess made by reckless bureaucrats. After four years of Biden’s lawless war on capitalism, it’s about time someone reminded Washington who’s boss.
James Skyles is a legal policy analyst and the principal of Skyles Law Group. He has written for some of the largest legal publications in the United States, including Law.com and Law360.
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