Fired FTC Officials Warn of ‘Corruption,’ Threat to Independent Agencies

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2025 – Two Democratic Federal Trade Commissioners, removed by President Donald Trump without cause in March, raised concerns Thursday about potential conflicts of interest surrounding their dismissal.

The two Democrats, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, are scheduled to appear before the U.S. District Court here on Tuesday, May 20, for oral arguments in a case challenging their removals. The outcome could redefine the limits of presidential authority over independent agencies, setting sweeping precedent for bodies like the FTC, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Reserve, and others.

“My main focus and concern is not on politicization of the FTC, but rather corruption and the overt appearance of corruption,” said Bedoya, speaking at a Competitive Enterprise Institute event on Thursday which examined the constitutional limits of federal agencies, including the FTC, FCC, and the Justice Department, in addressing media bias and content moderation.

Bedoya pointed to a sequence of events that he said raises questions about the motivations behind the firings. It began with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Nine days later, Meta settled a federal lawsuit for $25 million — $22 million of which was allocated to the Trump presidential library.

Slaughter and Bedoya were removed from the FTC on March 18. Two weeks later, Zuckerberg visited the Oval Office reportedly to lobby the president to drop the FTC’s antitrust suit against Meta, according to the Wall Street Journal. Days later, new FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson – who had previously supported continuing the suit against Meta – was quoted in The Verge saying he would comply with a lawful order from the president to drop it.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” Bedoya said. He previously suggested that his own enforcement actions against companies tied to Trump’s allies, including Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX leader Elon Musk, may have contributed to his dismissal.

Slaughter focused on the statutory and constitutional questions at the heart of the case. 

She argued that removal protections for FTC commissioners were grounded in both the plain text of the FTC Act of 1914, which limits removal to “for cause,” and in longstanding precedent set by the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which reaffirmed that notion.

But in a legal brief filed last month, the Trump Justice Department urged the court to reject precedent established in Humphrey’s Executor. DOJ attorneys argued that the modern FTC exercises “significant executive power” and that its commissioners must be removable at will in order to ensure presidential control over the executive branch.

“There’s a question about the validity of the Humphrey’s Executor precedent,” Slaughter said. “The case actually isn’t really just about that precedent. It is about the plain language of a statute passed by Congress. And I think we really have to start there.”

Congress deliberately sought to insulate the FTC from executive control, she said.

“Congress structured not only the FTC, but basically myriad other federal agencies to be multi-member, bipartisan commissions with terms of years and protections against removal,” Slaughter said.

Statutory language was just as important as court precedent, she said.

“What we are arguing is that there is plain text of a statute passed by Congress over 100 years ago and replicated in many other institutions, and that both the administration and the courts need to respect that statute,” she said. 

Asked whether the FTC has changed enough to make Humphrey’s inapplicable, Slaughter rejected that idea. 

“I think it's not entirely accurate to say that the nature of the functions of the FTC are so different today as to render the agency described in Humphrey’s unrecognizable,” she pushed back.

Slaughter cautioned that the case was about more than just the FTC. If the court rejects the principles upheld in Humphrey’s Executor, she said, it could threaten the independence of a wide range of federal agencies – including the FCC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Reserve Board.

“Most good litigation starts and ends with the language of the statute,” Slaughter said. “That is what we are pointing to.”