Trump v. Slaughter · ¶120

Congress’s newfound ability to insulate agencies from direct presidential control may have encouraged it to lean into the last essential pillar of Wilson’s design too. In Humphrey’s wake, Congress increasingly assigned broad powers to the agencies it created, including legislative and judicial powers. Before Humphrey’s, delegating those sorts of authorities to an agency risked “merely increasing” the President’s own power—he might remove agency heads and seek new ones who would do his bidding. Landis 46; see also I. Sharfman, The Interstate Commerce Commission: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure, pt. 2, p. 453 (1931). But Humphrey’s changed the equation, making independent agencies more tempting repositories for delegated powers that the President could not access with quite such ease.

slip opinion, revised 7/07/26
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