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On Monday morning, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that for more than 90 years let Congress shield the heads of independent agencies from being fired at a president’s whim. The vote was 6–3. In a companion case handed down the same hour, the court spared the Federal Reserve, the one exception it had long flagged, and let board member Lisa Cook keep her seat by a 5–4 vote.

It will be called a landmark, and it is. It should not be called a surprise. The position the court adopted was written down three years ago, in Project 2025, and the lawyer who wrote that document’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent the past year running the FCC, carrying it out.

A year before the ruling, the mechanics were tested on officials the president had already removed. Gwynne Wilcox sat on the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris on the Merit Systems Protection Board, and both statutes allowed removal only for cause, after notice and a hearing. Neither received any. In May 2025, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket and without full argument, let both removals stand and never mentioned Humphrey’s. Both boards........

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