Humphrey's Executor v. United States

Humphrey's Executor v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued May 1, 1935 Decided May 27, 1935
Full case name	Humphrey's Executor v. United States Rathbun, Executor v. United States
Citations	295 U.S. 602 (more) 55 S. Ct. 869; 79 L. Ed. 1611; 1935 U.S. LEXIS 1089
Holding
Congress may create quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies that are independent of executive control. The legislative intent of the Federal Trade Commission Act's for-cause removal provision was to limit the President's removal power. Shurtleff distinguished, Myers limited.
Court membership
Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes Associate Justices Willis Van Devanter · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · George Sutherland Pierce Butler · Harlan F. Stone Owen Roberts · Benjamin N. Cardozo
Case opinion
Majority	Sutherland, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
U.S. Const. art. I; U.S. Const. art. II; Federal Trade Commission Act
Overruled by
Trump v. Boyle ?

Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled that the U.S. Constitution allows the U.S. Congress to enact laws limiting the ability of the President of the United States to fire the executive officials of an independent agency that is quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial in nature.

The case involved William E. Humphrey, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had fired in 1933. Roosevelt had fired Humphrey over their policy disagreements involving economic regulation and the New Deal, even though the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 prohibited firing an FTC commissioner for any reason other than "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

Background

When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he was dissatisfied with Humphrey and viewed him as inadequately supportive of the New Deal.

Humphrey had served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission since 1925, having been appointed by President Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge's successor, President Herbert Hoover, appointed Humphrey to a second seven-year term in 1931. Humphrey was an outspoken and controversial FTC commissioner who stridently opposed most of the agency's anti-trust enforcement actions.

Roosevelt twice wrote to Humphrey asking him to resign because his policies did not align with his own, but Humphrey refused.

You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence.

— Letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Commissioner William Humphrey (August 31, 1933).

In October 1933, Roosevelt wrote Humphrey a third letter that simply fired him. Nevertheless, Humphrey continued to come to work at the FTC even after he was formally fired. The Federal Trade Commission Act permitted the President to dismiss an FTC member only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Roosevelt's decision to dismiss Humphrey was based solely on political differences, rather than job performance or alleged acts of malfeasance.

William Humphrey died before the Supreme Court could rule on whether his dismissal by the President from the Federal Trade Commission was valid.

Five months after his firing, on February 14, 1934, Humphrey died of a stroke at age 71. After his firing, the FTC had stopped paying Humphrey his salary of $10,000 per year (equivalent to $243,000 in 2024). Samuel Rathbun, the executor of Humphrey's estate, sued the U.S. federal government in the United States Court of Claims. Rathbun claimed that Humphrey's firing had been unlawful and that the federal government therefore owed Humphrey's estate five months of back pay for the period of time between his firing and his death.

Questions presented

During the course of adjudicating the lawsuit, the Court of Claims issued two certified questions to the U.S. Supreme Court:

1. "Do the provisions of section 1 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, stating that 'any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office', restrict or limit the power of the President to remove a commissioner except upon one or more of the causes named?"
2. "If the foregoing question is answered in the affirmative, then—If the power of the President to remove a commissioner is restricted or limited as shown by the foregoing interrogatory and the answer made thereto, is such a restriction or limitation valid under the Constitution of the United States?"

These certified questions were the basis for the Supreme Court's decision.

Supreme Court

Argument

The government argued that Shurtleff was controlling as to the first question: "[I]t is a settled recipe of construction that the mere statutory enumeration of causes for which an appointee may be removed does not confine the exercise of the President's power to removal for one or more of those causes". Citing Myers as precedent, the government further argued that distinguishing Shurtleff would raise serious constitutional questions.

Humphrey's Executor argued that the expressio unius rule of statutory construction confirmed the intent of Congress to limit the power of removal to the causes enumerated in the statute.

Decision

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of Rathbun and Humphrey's estate, holding that the removal restrictions in the FTC Act did not violate the Constitution.

In an opinion written by Justice George Sutherland, the Court distinguished between executive officers and quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial officers. The Court concluded that Congress had intended to create an independent, non-partisan agency "free from 'political domination or control'" by providing tenure protection to "limit the executive power of removal to the causes enumerated". The FTC was a non-partisan body "which shall be independent of executive authority, except in its selection and free to exercise its judgment without the leave or hindrance of ... any department of the government."

The Court, emphasizing the separation of powers principle, limited Myers v. United States and rejected its dicta. Edward Samuel Corwin later said the holding "recanted much of the Taft opinion" which, in dictum cited Shurtleff in a lengthy argument asserting, inter alia, that for-cause tenure protection provisions that limited the President's removal power would be unconstitutional.The Humphrey's Court distinguished Shurtleff because Congress had not provided a duration for the term of appointment in that case, and the Court had declined to read "good behavior" tenure protection into the text where it was not expressly stated by Congress.

The Court's decision limited the President's inherent supervisory power to "purely executive officers".

Subsequent developments

Conservative justices including William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, and scholars Walter Gellhorn, Theodore J. Lowi and David Schoenbrod, among others, have argued that independent agencies are unaccountable.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB in Seila Law v. CFPB, described Humphrey's Executor as recognizing an exception for non-partisan "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" agencies that have been structured to preserve agency expertise. In Seila Law the court's conservative majority decided that Humphrey's Executor was not a controlling precedent when an agency was vested with significant executive power and led by a single director.

Overturning Humphrey's Executor was seen as a key point in Project 2025. On May 22, 2025, in a 6-3 unsigned order in response to an emergency appeal from Trump, the Supreme Court stayed the reinstatement of two independent regulators, Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and chair Cathy A. Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, pending further review in lower courts. The unsigned order stated that "because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents." However, the Court did not rule on the merits, with the order stating "The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power. But we do not ultimately decide in this posture whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within such a recognized exception; that question is better left for resolution after full briefing and argument."

The decision was sharply criticized by Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that the ruling had effectively repealed Humphrey's Executor "by fiat", and that "nowhere is short-circuiting our deliberative process less appropriate than when the ruling requested would disrespect—by either overturning or narrowing—one of this Court's longstanding precedents". Kagan also criticized the order's call-out to separate the Federal Reserve Board from other independent agencies, saying that this board's independence "rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on — which is to say it rests largely on Humphrey's."

See also

• The Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution
• Tenure of Office Act (1867)
• Shurtleff v. United States, 189 U.S. 311 (1903) ("In the absence of constitutional or statutory provision, the President can, by virtue of his general power of appointment, remove an officer, even though he were appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.").
• Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 53 (1926) ("The President is empowered by the Constitution to remove any executive officer appointed by him by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and this power is not subject in its exercise to the assent of the Senate, nor can it be made so by an act of Congress.").
• Wiener v. United States, 357 U.S. 349 (1958)
• Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714 (1986) ("In light of these precedents, we conclude that Congress cannot reserve for itself the power of removal of an officer charged with the execution of the laws except by impeachment.").
• Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 675 (1988) ("[T]here was little or no debate on the question whether the Clause empowers Congress to provide for interbranch appointments, and there is nothing to suggest that the Framers intended to prevent Congress from having that power.").
• Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U.S. 197 (2020)
• Federal Trade Commission v. Raladam Co., 283 U.S. 643, 650 (131) ("The foregoing view of the powers of the Commission under the Act finds confirmation, if that be needed, in the committee reports and the statements of those in charge of the legislation, as well as in the debate which took place in the Senate, extending over weeks oftime and covering hundreds of pages in the Congressional Record...It is true, at least generally, that statements made in debate cannot be used as aids to the construction of a statute. But the fact that throughout the consideration of this legislation there was common agreement in the debate as to the great purpose of the act, may properly be considered in determining what that purpose was and what were the evils sought to be remedied.").
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 295
• Lawsuits over removals of independent agency heads during the second Trump presidency

References

Works cited

• Cross, C.B. (1954). "Removal Power of the President and the Test of Responsibility". Cornell Law Review. 40 (1).
• Crane, Daniel E. (2015). "Debunking Humphrey's Executor" (PDF). George Washington University Law Review. 83 (6): 1835–75.
• Krent, Harold J. (1990). "Fragmenting the Unitary Executive: Congressional Delegations of Administrative Authority Outside the Federal Government" (PDF). Northwestern University Law Review. 85 (1).
• Lessig, Lawrence; Sunstein, Cass (1994). "The President and the Administration". Columbia Law Review. 94 (1).
• Strauss, Peter L. (1984). "The Place of Agencies in Government: Separation of Powers and the Fourth Branch". Columbia Law Review. 84 (3): 574–669.
• Winerman, Marc; Kovacic, Wiliam E. (2011). "The William Humphrey and Abram Myers Years: The FTC from 1925 to 1929" (PDF). Antitrust Law Journal. 77 (4).
• Entin, Jonathan L. (1986). "The Removal Power and the Federal Defecit: Form, Substance, and Administrative Independence". Kentucky Law Journal. 75 (4).

External links

• Works related to Humphrey's Executor v. United States at Wikisource
• Text of Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935) is available from: Cornell CourtListener Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress