With Lisa Cook Ruling, Supreme Court Shields Fed from President Trump

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Sarah Holder** (0:08)
In an eagerly awaited decision issued today, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook can continue to serve in her role as she fights a legal battle against the Trump administration's attempts to remove her. But in another decision dropped on Monday, the nation's top court broadly affirmed the president's right to fire top government officials, increasing the White House's control of potentially dozens of agencies that have long operated independently.
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. On today's show, Amara Omeokwe, who edits Bloomberg's Fed coverage, and Bloomberg senior legal reporter Zoe Tillman, unpack what the Supreme Court's latest decisions mean for the Trump administration, the Federal Reserve, and the power of the president over other long independent government agencies.
Zoe, after weeks of waiting, we finally got Supreme Court decisions this morning on Trump v. Cook and Trump v. Slaughter. Two cases with big implications for the president's ability to fire top officials at regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and the Federal Reserve. What just happened?

**Zoe Tillman** (1:31)
What happened is that the Fed wins, and pretty much every other agency in the executive branch, either you could say loses or now is in limbo in terms of its protections against a president coming in and removing its members. And then the final takeaway here is that Lisa Cook can stay in her job for now, but the opinion was not a full-throated defense of her ability to stay in her job forever. So you sort of had these three big takeaways that we were waiting on. These were largely expected outcomes based on how arguments went, the way the court has been leaning over the past year and a half as it has dealt with other agency firing cases that have come up on its so-called shadow or emergency docket where, you know, the court has, at least in some instances, backed the president and said, you know, at least while legal fights are pending, until we resolve this, yes, you can remove certain members from agencies.
And we expected them to treat the Fed differently. You know, how differently was the question? And what we got from the Chief Justice John Roberts today was a fairly full-throated endorsement of its independence. The central bank is special. It is different. It is independent. But in this other decision, they basically said many other so-called independent agencies are operating within the president's purview of policy, and therefore, they don't get those same protections. So that's sort of the big picture of what they did today.

**Sarah Holder** (3:03)
I want to talk more about the Slaughter decision. This is a case that stemmed from Trump's March 2025 dismissal of the Democratic FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.
The court's decision today effectively overturns a Supreme Court decision from 1935, Humphrey's executor v. United States. Back then, the justices ruled unanimously that the president could not fire Federal Trade Commissioners solely because of policy differences, and it affirmed that Congress, in some instances, can set up agencies that are independent from the executive branch, and whose members can only be fired for cause, not at will. So Zoe, what's the impact of this new ruling?

**Zoe Tillman** (3:43)
Right. So what the court specifically did was say that the FTC, there could not be a for cause protection from members of the FTC. So when we talk about for cause, meaning that there is a special legal bar for what it takes for the president to fire a member of a multi-member agency like the FTC. What exactly cause is, is not clearly defined. What the court said in the Slaughter case is that for an agency that is carrying out ultimately the prerogatives of the president and part of that executive apparatus, that at will removal is appropriate. Because the president has a right to determine the policies of his administration and his executive branch. The conservatives said you can't have different agencies at loggerheads with the president, the chief of the executive branch when they are fulfilling these types of policy roles.
And they did not say that every agency now falls into this at will category. They sort of stopped short. And they didn't offer us a comprehensive list of every agency that they would conclude is like the FTC, where the president can now remove members at will.
They left the door open a little bit, perhaps, for other agencies to come in and argue that they are truly independent, like the Fed. But the court also raised the bar quite high. So we expect, for the most part, that at will, removal power to extend across the full pantheon of what we long considered independent agencies across the executive branch.