Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 29, 2026
On the same afternoon, the Supreme Court told the president two different things about the same power.
Both cases asked the same question: can the president remove the head of an agency Congress built to be independent of him? In Trump v. Cook, the answer was no — for now. Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor Trump had attempted to fire in August 2025 over disputed mortgage-fraud allegations, will keep her seat while her case proceeds, the Court ruled 5-4. It was the first attempted removal of a Fed governor in the central bank’s 112-year history, and the Court left the door open only a crack: Cook stays for now, with oral argument on the merits set for January.
In Trump v. Slaughter, decided the same day, the answer was yes. The Court allowed Trump to remove Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States — a 1935 ruling that, for ninety years, had let Congress shield certain agency officials from at-will presidential removal specifically so agencies like the FTC could regulate without answering to whoever currently held the White House. Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Slaughter stated the underlying theory without much cover: “Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one president. Subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”
That theory would apply just as easily to Cook. The Court declined to apply it — for now — because, as the majority reasoned, the Fed is different: older, more central to the economy, more likely to spook markets if its independence looked uncertain. The exception is not a rule. It is a preference, extended to the one agency whose independence the market still prices in.
Essay 12 named the room this fits: institutions recomposed to serve, one removal at a time, the accountability vacuum growing not through a single dramatic seizure but through which officials get exceptions and which don’t. The FTC’s independence ended on a Monday afternoon by a five-word theory of the presidency. The Fed’s independence survived the same afternoon, on the same theory, because the Court decided — for now — that the cost of applying it there was higher than the benefit.
Nothing about the reasoning that spared Cook is permanent. Oral argument on the merits is scheduled for January. What happens to her case then is what happens to whether Monday’s exception was a boundary or just a delay.
Essay 12 — The Converging Frames
Sources: SCOTUSblog, “Court prevents Trump from firing Fed governor,” June 29, 2026. NBC News, “Supreme Court rules Trump cannot fire Fed member Lisa Cook, grants him more power over other independent agencies,” June 29, 2026. CNBC, “Supreme Court rules Trump cannot fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook for now,” June 29, 2026. ABA Banking Journal, “U.S. Supreme Court allows Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in office,” June 29, 2026.
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