Humphrey's Executor v. United States

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1935 United States Supreme Court case

Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that the U.S. Congress may limit the power of the President of the United States to fire certain government officials, even though the president is the chief executive of the U.S. government. The Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution allows Congress to restrict the President's authority to dismiss the leaders of independent agencies that are "quasi-legislative" or "quasi-judicial" in nature.

The case stemmed from President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's 1933 dismissal of William E. Humphrey as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Roosevelt had fired Humphrey over policy disagreements involving economic regulation and the New Deal , despite the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 giving the President the power to remove an FTC commissioner only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Court unanimously held that this limitation on the President's authority to remove FTC commissioners was constitutional and therefore that Humphrey's dismissal had been unlawful.

Over the course of the 20th century, Humphrey's Executor came to be viewed as the canonical precedent for the constitutionality of independent agencies in the U.S. federal government. The decision received criticism from some scholars during the latter part of the 20th century who claimed it unconstitutionally limits the powers of the president. During the second Donald Trump presidency, several controversial firings of independent-agency executive officials spawned lawsuits challenging the ongoing validity of Humphrey's Executor, with the decision overturned by _Trump v. Slaughter _ in June 2026.

Background

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) fired FTC Commissioner William Humphrey (right) due solely to their policy disagreements, even though the FTC Act listed only "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" as the reasons a President could remove a commissioner.

Humphrey had been one of the five commissioners of the FTC since his appointment in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge , having been reappointed in 1931 by President Herbert Hoover . An outspoken and controversial commissioner, Humphrey was a conservative Republican who opposed most of the Commission's antitrust enforcement actions and frequently engaged in personal and political attacks. In public speeches, he criticized the FTC's "old policy of litigation" against American companies, contending that it had made the Commission "an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury instead of a help to business."

Upon assuming the presidency in 1933, Roosevelt quickly developed a strong dislike for Humphrey, whom he viewed as insufficiently supportive of his New Deal agenda. In his first months in office, Roosevelt twice wrote letters to Humphrey asking him to resign because his views did not align with Roosevelt's own.

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).

Humphrey resisted Roosevelt's requests and refused to resign. In October 1933, Roosevelt sent Humphrey a third letter that simply fired him. Humphrey's dismissal was based solely on his political and ideological differences with Roosevelt, rather than on poor performance or misconduct. This conflicted with Section 1 of the FTC Act, which listed only "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" as the reasons a President could remove an FTC commissioner from office.

In February 1934, five months after his firing, Humphrey died of a stroke at age 71. Upon his dismissal, the FTC had stopped paying Humphrey his salary of $10,000 per year (equivalent to $249,000 in 2025), even though he had continued to come to work at the FTC each day. Samuel Rathbun, the executor of Humphrey's estate , sued the U.S. government in the Court of Claims , claiming that Humphrey's firing had been unlawful and that the government therefore owed his estate five months of back pay for the period between his firing and his death.

While 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?"

Answering these certified questions was the basis for the Supreme Court's decision.

Supreme Court

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Argument

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William J. Donovan argued, on behalf of the executor of the Humphrey estate, that the expressio unius rule of statutory construction confirmed the intent of Congress was to limit the removal of FTC Commissioners to "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" only. On the government's view Humphrey's Executor presented the same question as _Shurtleff v. United States _ (1903) but this argument failed because the FTC's structure was different. The government, citing _Myers v. United States _, also made a constitutional argument.

Decision

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Justice George Sutherland, the author of the Supreme Court's opinion in Humphrey's Executor.

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of Rathbun and Humphrey's estate. In an opinion written by Justice George Sutherland , the Court ruled that it was not a violation of the Constitution for the FTC Act to limit the power of the President to remove FTC commissioners only to situations involving "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office".

The Court’s opinion gave four main reasons for its ruling. First, the Court said that when Congress had created the FTC in 1914, it had intended the Commission to be a federal government agency that was independent and non-partisan. The opinion described the FTC as an agency that was supposed to be free from control by the President and the executive branch, except for the initial appointments of its commissioners by the President:

The commission is to be nonpartisan, and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality. It is charged with the enforcement of no policy except the policy of the law. ...

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The debates in both houses demonstrate that the prevailing view was that the commission was not to be "subject to anybody in the government, but ... only to the people of the United States"; free from "political dominati

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