By David McCabe and Cecilia Kang
President Donald Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, a rejection of the corporate regulator’s traditional independence that may clear the way for the administration’s agenda.
The White House told the Democrats, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, that the president was terminating their roles, according to statements from the pair. The FTC, which enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws, typically has five members, with the president’s party holding three seats and the opposing party two.
Members of the FTC and other independent regulatory boards are protected from removal under a 1935 Supreme Court precedent that says the president may not fire them solely over policy disagreements. Slaughter and Bedoya said they planned to challenge Trump’s decision in court.
“Today the president illegally fired me from my position as a federal trade commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent,” Slaughter, whom Trump nominated to the FTC during his first term in 2018, said in a statement. “Why? Because I have a voice. And he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people.”
In an interview, Bedoya, who became a commissioner three years ago, said he was worried that an FTC without independence from the president would be subject to the whims of Trump’s business world allies.
“When people hear this news, they need to not think about me,” he said. “They need to think about the billionaires behind the president at his inauguration.”
Tuesday’s firings are Trump’s latest attempt to assert the power of the presidency over independent regulators at agencies inside the U.S. government, including those that Congress set up to be independent from direct White House control. While regulators are appointed by the president, many of them have traditionally held wide latitude to determine the direction of their agencies.
But the Trump administration has disregarded their traditional protections.
“I am writing to inform you that you have been removed from the Federal Trade Commission, effective immediately,” said a letter sent to one of the commissioners, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”
The Republican chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, said in a statement Tuesday that the agency would continue protecting consumers but backed Trump’s authority to fire the commissioners.
“President Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch and is vested with all of the executive power of our government,” Ferguson said. “I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove commissioners, which is necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government.”
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The firings followed an executive order from Trump last month that sought greater authority over the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.
The order required the independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserted power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declared that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.
In January, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the NLRB. She sued to challenge her dismissal, and a judge reinstated her early this month. The administration has appealed that ruling.
The Justice Department no longer plans to defend as constitutional the Supreme Court precedent on firing regulators only for cause, according to a Feb. 12 letter that the acting solicitor general, Sarah Harris, sent to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. The department’s analysis applies to the FTC, the NLRB and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, according to the letter, which was first reported by Reuters.
The letter sent to one of the FTC commissioners on behalf of Trump on Tuesday reiterated that position. The Supreme Court protections do not fit “the principal officers who head the FTC today,” the letter said.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School who studies antitrust, said the FTC had been established as an independent agency in 1914 “on the theory that consumer protection and the various goals of the FTC were better addressed through less political means.”
“If we introduce the idea of political hirings and firings there, that serves to really undermine both the things the FTC can do and also its legitimacy as a bipartisan institution,” she said.
Corporate executives and their advisers are closely watching the direction of the FTC under Ferguson, its new chair. During the Biden administration, the FTC sued to block corporate mergers, aggressively punished companies for user-privacy failures and filed a sweeping lawsuit accusing Amazon of squeezing small businesses. It is set to face off with Meta during a trial in April scrutinizing the social media company’s strategy in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to cement its dominance.
Slaughter and Bedoya have consistently voted in favor of actions to rein in the power of the tech giants.
After Trump nominated Slaughter to the majority-Republican commission in 2018 to fill an unexpired term, President Joe Biden nominated her for a full seven-year term in February 2023. She previously served as chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the current minority leader, and led his congressional work on telecommunications and tech legislation.
Bedoya, a former head of a tech and privacy center at Georgetown University and Senate aide, joined the FTC in May 2022 after Biden nominated him.
Bedoya said in the interview that he had learned of Trump’s decision when he received a call from Slaughter while at his daughter’s gymnastics class.
“He’s trying to fire me,” Bedoya said. “I am still an FTC commissioner, and I am going to go to court to make sure that’s clear to everybody.”
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