Former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter Talks Supreme Court Ruling

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Joe Mathieu** (0:07)
Joining us now for more on the Slaughter case specifically is its namesake, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the fired FTC commissioner by President Trump, who of course fought that and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, a challenge that of course ended with this ruling yesterday. Welcome back to Bloomberg TV and radio commissioner. We consider President Trump's words about your case and the court's ruling. He called it the biggest and most consequential decision issued by the court, which he says gives tremendous additional power back to the presidency.
Is that the right characterization?

**Rebecca Kelly Slaughter** (0:43)
Yes, I think that's exactly the right characterization. It's exactly why I think the ruling is so disturbing. It is a massive transfer of power from Congress to the president, and it's a transfer that transforms these agencies that Congress set up to work for and be accountable to the people into instruments of the powerful and of the executive.

**Kailey Leinz** (1:09)
Well, kind of interesting to hear you agree with Donald Trump in a live conversation, Rebecca. Thank you for coming back to talk to us here on Bloomberg.
What's the result of this? The door keeps swinging every four to eight years. It's not just the administration that changes, but the entire administrative state.

**Rebecca Kelly Slaughter** (1:28)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think it's important to go back to the history and understand that this is not a partisan issue and it certainly shouldn't be a partisan issue. The case that was overturned yesterday, Humphrey's executive was the case of a conservative pro business Republican who FDR tried to fire from the FTC because Commissioner Humphrey was running around calling the New Deal Socialist and FDR didn't like that. And so the precedent, the 91 year old unanimous precedent actually originally protected a pro business Republican's ability to provide transparency and accountability at the FTC. The other way I think about it, it's not about whether a president can set policy or pick people to work at agencies, think about it a little bit like corporate boards.
We have a requirement that publicly traded companies have independent boards of directors, not so that the CEO can't be in charge, but the decisions that the CEO makes are really in the best interests of the shareholders of the company and not just a way to do favors for his pals or enrich himself. These boards and commissions like the FTC or the Federal Communications Commission were set up by Congress with a similar structure to make sure that their decisions were in the best interest of the shareholders of the American government, the taxpayers, and not just to benefit the executive.

**Joe Mathieu** (2:56)
Well, when we consider the setup of these independent commissioners, there is usually a partisan split, if you will. You can't have a clean tie on a lot of these boards as you put them. Rebecca, so what would be lost if a president is able to effectively just get rid of anyone who was appointed by a predecessor of a different party? Is it not the case that usually you would still see things swing the way the administration wants it to swing, given the majority that would be there on the commission?

**Rebecca Kelly Slaughter** (3:26)
Yeah, I think what is lost is a lot of the quality of the debate and the discussion and the work that the agency produces. I started at the FTC as a Trump appointee, as a minority commissioner in the first Trump administration. I was in the majority during the Biden administration, back to the minority. I've seen all sides of it. What I learned from experience is that there is enormous benefit to the agency and to the public from having a leadership structure that requires you to engage with people from different political perspectives, understand their point of view, try to find consensus. There's an incentive to find consensus where you can so that decisions will have durability and stability throughout administrations. And then to air for the public respectful disagreements when you can't reach that consensus. And that quality of debate and discussion consideration is absolutely lost if we move to agencies that are just going to swing wildly one way or the other. And I think the downstream consequences are not just at the leadership level of these agencies, but if the principle that the court articulated in my case holds, it also decimates the civil service, for example, or any of the sort of career expertise that we have over centuries worked to build up in our government so that it can really do its best work on behalf of the American people.