White House claims authority over FTC, SEC, FCC despite Humphrey's Executor

On February 18, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled 'Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies' claiming presidential control over independent regulatory agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The order requires these agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review, allows OMB Director Russell Vought to set performance standards and adjust agency budgets, and asserts that Article II vests all executive power in the president. This claim directly challenges Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court precedent that protects independent agency commissioners from presidential removal except for cause, though the Court narrowed this precedent in Seila Law v. CFPB (2020). The administration also froze $2.6 billion to Harvard and $400 million to Columbia over campus speech policies, and deployed 700 Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles for immigration enforcement. Federal judges ruled both the university funding freezes and the military deployment violated federal law, finding the administration used funding cuts to retaliate against protected speech and violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military forces for domestic law enforcement without proper authorization.

Key facts

On February 18, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 'Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies' requiring independent agencies (FTC, SEC, FCC, FDIC, CFTC) to submit all proposed regulations to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and allowing OMB Director Russell Vought to set performance standards and adjust their budgets, explicitly excluding only the Federal Reserve's monetary policy functions from this oversight (NPR, Washington Post, White House fact sheet).

The executive order cites Article II's vesting of 'all executive power' in the president as justification, advancing the unitary executive theory that all executive branch officials are subject to presidential supervision, which conflicts with Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), where the Supreme Court ruled Congress can limit presidential removal of independent agency commissioners to cases of 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance' (Supreme Court opinion via Justia, Wikipedia).

The Supreme Court narrowed Humphrey's Executor in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U.S. 197 (2020), holding that removal protections only apply to agencies with multimember commissions or agencies without substantial executive power, creating legal uncertainty about single-director independent agencies (Supreme Court opinion, Center for American Progress analysis).

Russell Vought, Trump's OMB director confirmed in February 2025, co-authored the Project 2025 Executive Office of the President chapter and stated his goal is to 'identify the pockets of independence and seize them,' having helped write 350 executive orders and regulations to empower presidential control over previously independent agencies (ProPublica investigative report, Senate testimony, National Women's Law Center).

In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled the Trump administration's freeze of $2.6 billion in Harvard research funding violated the First Amendment, finding the administration 'used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities' after Harvard refused to end DEI programs, change hiring practices, and accept White House ideological oversight (District Court opinion, Harvard Crimson, NBC News).

The Trump administration froze $400 million to Columbia University in March 2025 and extracted a $221 million settlement in July requiring Columbia to prohibit 'illegal' DEI programs, hire new faculty to supervise Middle Eastern studies, and install officers with arrest powers, representing unprecedented executive use of funding cuts to control university speech and curriculum (ACE statement, ABC News, Wikipedia education policy page).

In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled Trump's deployment of 700 U.S. Marines and 4,000 federalized California National Guard troops to Los Angeles for immigration enforcement violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, finding the administration 'systematically used armed soldiers and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control' for civilian law enforcement without proper congressional authorization (District Court opinion, CNN, CalMatters).

Andrew Ferguson, appointed FTC Chair on January 20, 2025, became the first head of an independent agency to publicly state that 'Humphrey's Executor was wrongly decided, is deeply anti-democratic, and ought to be overruled,' signaling the administration's intention to challenge the constitutional basis for agency independence through test cases and regulatory rollback (Axios exclusive interview, FTC press release, The Intercept).

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