For the better part of the second Trump presidency, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has been in court, fighting to get her job back. Last March, Donald Trump fired her without cause from her Senate-appointed role as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, violating federal law and the nearly century-old precedent that gave rise to modern independent agencies—which empowers Congress to insulate their leaders and expertise from political pressure and corruption.
Lower courts agreed with her view of the law, briefly reinstating her a couple of times, but the Supreme Court had other ideas. And last month, in Trump v. Slaughter, its conservative supermajority ruled against Slaughter by overruling that precedent, and, in the process, declared that lawmakers’ decisions to shield officeholders like her from the whims of the president was unconstitutional. Writing for the court’s Republican-aligned justices, Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that “Slaughter served as the President’s subordinate at the FTC,” and thus he “was entitled to cut her tenure short.”
The landmark decision, which will shape the future of American governance in everything from how to best safeguard public health to protecting against the concentration of corporate power, nonetheless doesn’t touch the biggest independent agency of them all: the Federal Reserve. To Slaughter and many others, this carveout doesn’t make sense and exposes the weakness in Roberts’s reasoning. “There are different rules for Wall Street than there are for Main Street,” she says.
On a more personal level, being the face of a constitutional showdown was, in her words, “not fun.” She couldn’t work, her agency staff was left in a state of limbo, and more than once she wallowed and thought about walking away. “I don’t even play a small violin for myself,” Slaughter says. But she decided to stay the course, refusing to let the administration and the Supreme Court destroy an institution and principles she cares about “with my permission.”
In this interview with Vanity Fair, Slaughter spoke at length about her decision to take the president to court, how she and others at the FTC experienced various states of joblessness, and why, in the end, this battle royale to resist executive control had nothing to do with her but everything to do with being accountable to the people she serves.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When Donald Trump fired you, his letter to you said, “Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” Knowing what you know now about the current administration, what do those words mean to you?
In one way, I think they were pretty empty and meaningless, right? It is not a detailed reason or policy disagreement or allegation that the statute provides for reasons an FTC commissioner could be terminated, which are inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance. So it was just a way of saying, “I don’t like you.”
