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federal trade commission
'Grave Danger': Warnings as Supreme Court Looks Ready to Hand Trump Even More Unchecked Power
The court's right-wing majority signaled a willingness to overturn the 90-year-old precedent Humphrey’s Executor—a move that would "enable Donald Trump’s corrupt march toward oligarchy," said one critic.
Dec 08, 2025
The warnings on Monday from the US Supreme Court’s liberal justices were stark as the Trump administration argued in favor of allowing the president to easily fire top officials at federal agencies—a move that would reverse nearly a century of precedent that originated with a unanimous ruling known as Humphrey's Executor in 1935.
"You're asking us to destroy the structure of government," Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued on behalf of the Trump administration that Humphrey's Executor limits presidential authority in an unconstitutional way even following rulings by the conservative majority that have weakened the decision.
Justice Elena Kagan added that setting aside the precedent and allowing President Donald Trump to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) board members and other federal agency leaders would “put massive, uncontrolled, unchecked power in the hands of the president.”
"Once you're down this road, it's a little bit hard to see how you stop," Kagan said.
But the court's right-wing majority signaled little concern about the unchecked authority it could give the president should it rule in Trump's favor in the coming months in Trump v. Slaughter, which centers on the White House's firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a strong defender of consumer rights in March.
Slaughter has said she was dismissed for being "inconsistent with [the] administration's priorities" as the Department of Government Efficiency was gutting federal agencies and rooting out programs and employees that were also viewed as being in the way of Trump's right-wing agenda.
But under Humphrey's Executor, which was decided after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to remove an FTC member, a president can fire a board member only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," in accordance with a law passed by Congress in 1914.
The ruling established that the president can remove executive officials without cause, but not at independent agencies that are "neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative," such as the FTC.
Sauer wrote in a court document that the ruling "was always egregiously wrong," furthering the argument made by right-wing proponents of the "unitary executive" theory—a view that holds that the president should hold absolute power over federal agencies, including by firing leaders they view as opposed to their agenda.
A lawyer for Slaughter, Amit Agarwal of Protect Democracy, told the justices on Monday that "dozens of institutions that have been around for a long time, that have withstood the test of time, that embody a distillation of human wisdom and experience, all of those would go south” if the court allowed the president to hold complete control over agencies.
Undoing Humphrey's Executor would “profoundly destabilize institutions that are now inextricably intertwined with the fabric of American governance," Slaughter's lawyers have argued.
Chief Justice John Roberts signaled an unwillingness to preserve the 90-year-old precedent, calling the ruling a "dried husk" at one point. Right-wing courts and justices have worked to weaken the precedent for more than a decade, with Roberts writing in a 2010 opinion that the president's power should be understood to include “the authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties."
A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that the CFPB's structure itself was unconstitutional because the president does not have the authority to fire the director of the independent agency without just cause.
On Monday, Josh Orton, director of judiciary reform group Demand Justice, said there was "grave danger in what the Supreme Court appears willing to do today: hand giant corporations and Donald Trump’s billionaire class unchecked power over our economic system, gutting one of the few institutions left that’s charged with ensuring fairness, stability, and competition in our economy.
“For generations, independent federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, have proven essential to the long-term stability of our country and markets—all to the benefit of workers, consumers, and businesses alike," said Orton.
A lower court ruled earlier this year that Slaughter had been illegally fired, but the Supreme Court in September allowed the dismissal to stand with an emergency order, until the case could be heard.
The Supreme Court has also permitted Trump to move forward, at least temporarily, with the firings of officials at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The justices on Monday signaled that even if they allow the president's firing of Slaughter and the other officials, they may not approve the dismissal of Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, who the court has permitted to stay in her role despite Trump's attempt to fire her. The court is scheduled to hear a separate case in January regarding Cook's firing.
But Kate Judge, a professor at Columbia Law School, said an overruling of Humphrey's Executor would ultimately have an impact on the Federal Reserve even if the justices carve out an exception.
"[The] Fed's practical independence and the legitimacy needed to sustain it grew alongside the independence of other agencies," said Judge. "It will be hard to maintain faith in one technocratic body while saying the rest are legitimate only because they are directly answerable to the president."
With or without an exception, Orton argued that "a Supreme Court that overturns Humphrey’s Executor and 90 years of precedent to enable Donald Trump’s corrupt march toward oligarchy is simply not a sustainable or legitimate institution.”
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Cloudflare Outage Ruin Your Morning? Consumer Groups Say Blame Profit-Hungry Big Tech Monopolists
"Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete," said one advocate.
Nov 18, 2025
Just weeks after major Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure outages, Cloudflare on Tuesday became the latest company to "break the internet," prompting consumer watchdogs to take aim at Big Tech and call out industry consolidation.
"This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants," said Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate, J.B. Branch, in a statement. "For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe."
"Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies," Branch continued. "Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn't held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies."
After Amazon's outage last month, Public Citizen and other groups—including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Tech Oversight Project—called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson "to swiftly conduct a market structure review of leading cloud services providers, including but not limited to Amazon, to assess how their market dominance and use of monopoly power to stifle competition is creating systemic fragility across industries."
"Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
"This probe should also examine dependencies of key sectors (such as financial services, telecommunications, and government services) on any single cloud provider and the extent to which those dependencies pose systemic risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection, as well as to our open markets and the resilience of our national and global infrastructure systems," the coalition argued. "We urge you to then take robust agency action to counter these systemic dangers, particularly to bring diversification to the cloud industry."
"Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis—the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now," the coalition concluded. "Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
Just a few weeks later, the Cloudflare outage on Tuesday impacted websites including ChatGPT, Coinbase, Dropbox, X, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, the Moody credit ratings service, and many more. According to Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company offers over 60 cloud services globally, and it protects "20% of all websites."
In a statement to Forbes, a company spokesperson said that "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services."
Stressing that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the spokesperson added that "we expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours."
Cloudflare also said on X—which is now working again—that "we always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations, and we will be publishing an in-depth blog shortly."
Meanwhile, Demand Progress Education Fund highlighted the coalition's recent letter to the FTC, and Emily Peterson-Cassin, the group's policy director, said that "yet again, a failure at one company disrupted the lives of people all around the globe."
"Big Tech's relentless drive to become the only fish in the pond and centralize the internet in their hands threatens our economy and our national security," she added. "The FTC has the knowledge and the power to help prevent this from happening again. For all our sakes, the agency must take action immediately."
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Trump FTC Deletes Lina Khan-Era Blog Posts Warning of Threat AI Poses to Consumers
The FTC quietly removed from its website an article titled "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm" as the Trump administration looks to undercut efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
Oct 20, 2025
The Trump administration's sweeping purge of government content that conflicts with its far-right ideological and policy project has extended to Federal Trade Commission blog posts warning about the threat that burgeoning artificial intelligence technology poses to US consumers.
Wired reported Monday that the Trump administration has, without explanation, deleted AI-related articles published by the FTC during antitrust trailblazer Lina Khan's tenure as chair of the agency. The headlines of two of the removed posts were "Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI" and "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm."
The latter article, which can still be read here, states that the FTC "is increasingly taking note of AI's potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination."
"As firms think about their own approach to developing, deploying, and maintaining AI-based systems, they should be considering the risks to consumers that each of them carry in the here and now, and take steps to proactively protect the public before their tools become a future FTC case study," reads the post, which was authored by staff at the FTC's Office of Technology and Division of Advertising Practices.
The page on the FTC website that previously hosted the article now displays an error message.
Wired noted that the Trump FTC's deletion of the Khan-era blog post is part of a broader scrubbing of government content critical of tech giants and artificial intelligence. In March, the outlet reported that Trump's FTC—currently led by Andrew Ferguson—"removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft."
The mass removal of Khan-era posts marks a sharp—and potentially illegal—break from the previous administration's handling of government-hosted content that conflicted with its views.
"During the Biden administration, FTC leadership placed 'warning' labels on business directives and other guidance published during previous administrations that it disagreed with," Wired reported. One unnamed FTC source told the outlet that the Trump administration's removal of the Khan-era posts "raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act."
The Trump administration's deletion of government content critical of AI comes months after it released an "AI Action Plan" that watchdogs pilloried as a gift to large tech corporations and an attempt to hamstring future efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
The plan calls for a review of all AI-related FTC investigations launched during Khan's tenure "to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation."
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in July that the Trump White House's AI plan was "written by Big Tech."
"A serious AI plan would recognize that the regulation to which this administration is so hostile facilitates innovation—it can help us ensure that we have AI for social good, rather than just corporate profit," said Weissman.
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