Trump wins power to sack regulators; Fed stays protected

An Iowa farmer who can’t run his own combine because John Deere’s software says so. A New York ride-share driver paying $10,000 a year more at the pump than he should. More than a million retail investors sitting on $2.3bn in losses from a crypto token that carried the president’s name. These are the people two Supreme Court rulings, handed down on the same day, just wrote out of the room.

On 29 June the Court ruled 6-3 in *Trump v. Slaughter* that the president can fire commissioners at independent regulatory agencies whenever he likes, for any reason or none. It swept away *Humphrey’s Executor*, the 91-year-old precedent that had stopped a president treating the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and roughly twenty other bodies as an extension of his own staff. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.” Justice Sotomayor, dissenting with Kagan and Jackson, said it handed Trump “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.”

On the very same day, in *Trump v. Cook*, the Court ruled 5-4 that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook keeps her job while she fights his attempt to sack her. Roberts’s reasoning: the Fed sits on “a different constitutional footing than other independent agencies because of its unique structure, history and role,” rooted in “the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Two agencies, two rules

Put the rulings side by side and the settlement is plain. The regulator that keeps toys off shelves when they choke children, that stops health insurers gouging patients, that blocks supermarket mergers from pushing up the price of milk, eggs and beef, can now be staffed entirely with people who serve at the president’s pleasure. The regulator that sets interest rates for the bond market and the banks stays out of his hands, at least for now.

Alvaro Bedoya knows the difference first-hand. Trump fired him from the FTC in March 2025 along with fellow commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, telling them their service was “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” No further reason was given. A district court reinstated Slaughter in July 2025; the Supreme Court has now reversed that. Bedoya’s reading of the two rulings, given to Democracy Now on 2 July, is the plainest description of what happened: “They’re making clear that the Wall Street bankers, the central bankers, they deserve an independent above-the-fray regulator. The rest of us schmucks get stuck with the loyalists.”

Slaughter called the ruling a licence for Trump “to reward his friends and punish his enemies and do so with impunity.” She has asked Congress to use “the power of the purse and the power of oversight” against it. Congress, controlled by Trump’s own party, shows no sign of doing so.

Who this president is

The timing hands the story a second layer. On 1 July, five days before this went to print and two days after the rulings, Trump’s annual financial disclosure showed he personally banked more than $1.4bn from family crypto ventures in 2025 alone: over $500m from World Liberty Financial, more than $600m from his memecoin. Forbes now puts his net worth at $6bn, up from $2.3bn the year before.

A Reuters investigation published in June found the wider Trump family made at least $2.3bn across four crypto ventures, taking 75% of token sales and a 60% company stake, while roughly a million retail investors lost a combined $2.3bn as the tokens they bought collapsed. $WLFI fell from around 31 cents to around 5 cents. None of those investors has yet been named publicly with a quote; that is a gap in the record, not a detail we can invent. What is documented is the shape of it: the family stayed in profit while the price fell.

None of that is a claim that the Court ruling caused those losses; the two events are separate. But they answer a question a reader is entitled to ask about the man who now gets to hire and fire the people meant to police exactly this kind of scheme. This is a president who made over a billion dollars in a year from a product that wiped out ordinary investors, at the same moment the Court handed him the power to remove the regulators built to stop that happening to anyone else. His donors stood over his shoulder at the inauguration. Bedoya’s phrase for it stands: “that’s what this is about.”

The honest complication

It would be dishonest to pretend Fed independence is itself the problem. An interest-rate policy set on presidential whim, chasing short-term political demands rather than inflation and employment, would hurt working people directly and immediately; that is precisely why Cook says Trump tried to remove her, “because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people.” Cook is the first African American woman to serve on the Fed’s Board. The Court’s ruling on her case is also narrower than the headlines suggest: it found only that Trump’s first attempt to fire her, built on a disputed mortgage-designation dispute Cook calls “a manufactured pretext,” lacked due process. It did not rule the Fed permanently untouchable, and a better-documented attempt could still succeed.

The point is not that the Fed should be exposed to the same treatment as the FTC. The point is the asymmetry itself: the one regulator whose independence Wall Street and the bond market actually need got a careful, historically grounded exemption running to pages of doctrine. The regulators that stand between working people and the companies that sell them food, medicine, tractors and insurance got none.

What changes now

The practical result lands on people who have never heard of Humphrey’s Executor. A future FTC chair who blocks a grocery merger, or an NLRB that sides with a union, or a Consumer Product Safety Commission that recalls a dangerous product from a donor’s factory, can be removed by phone call. The agencies survive on paper. Their independence does not.

Bedoya’s warning is not partisan noise; Slaughter and Bedoya are Democratic appointees, and independent agencies staffed by Democratic administrations have served corporate interests before now too. That is not the argument here. The argument is structural: a Court that spent 36 pages explaining why the president cannot be trusted near the Federal Reserve spent the same day deciding he can be trusted with everything else. An independent regulator for the bankers. Loyalists for everyone who buys milk, eggs, beef, insurance, or a combine with his own name on the deed.