Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LITIGATION NEWS, TRENDS—D.C. Circuit stays order that reinstated Slaughter as FTC Commissioner, (Jul 23, 2025)

By Peter Reap, J.D., LL.M.

A profile of the Trump-fired Commissioner made a brief reappearance on the FTC’s “roster” page following the district court reinstatement, but it was deleted earlier today.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. has issued an order administratively staying an order issued by the D.C. district court last week declaring FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s firing by President Trump unlawful and without legal effect. The appellate court’s brief order explained that “[t]he purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the motion for a stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion” in response to an emergency motion that had been filed late last week by Trump and the Justice Department. The appellees, fired former FTC Commissioners Slaughter and Alvaro M. Bedoya, were also ordered to file a response to the emergency motion by noon on Friday July 25, 2025 (Slaughter v. Trump, No. 25-5261 (D.C. Cir. July 21, 2025)).

Trump fires Slaughter, Bedoya. On March 18, 2025, President Trump fired FTC Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya by email without any stated legal cause. The move left the Commission with only Chair Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak as sitting commissioners. Both are Republicans. With the departure of former Chair Lina Khan, the FTC was left, at the time, with only two of a possible five commissioners. Trump’s nominee for a third Commissioner, Mark Meador, was confirmed by a 50-46 party-line vote by the Senate on April 10, 2025.

Slaughter, Bedoya file suit. Fired Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya filed a lawsuit in the federal district court in the District of Columbia on March 27, 2025 seeking their “purported” firings.” The six-count complaint seeking declaratory, injunctive, and mandamus relief also named fellow FTC Commissioners Andrew Ferguson, Melissa Holyoak, and FTC Executive Director David Robbins as defendants. The complaint stated Slaughter and Bedoya “will not and do not accept” President Trump’s “unlawful” firing action. Referring to the Supreme Court’s 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor, “[i]f the President can ignore a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling to fire us with no cause, it won’t just shatter norms. It’ll ripple through the whole economy,” said Bedoya, in a companion Protect Democracy Project, Inc. press release.

District court finds firing unlawful. On July 17, 2025, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of Slaughter, and declared her firing unlawful and without legal effect. The court found that the provisions of the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act) on the removal of FTC Commissioners is clear and held that it was “patently obvious” that Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), in which the Supreme Court upheld the FTC Act’s for-cause removal protection, controlled. The court also dismissed the claims of former Commissioner Bedoya, finding that his subsequent official resignation from his position rendered his claims moot.

Emergency motion for stay of district court order. On July 21, 2025, President Trump filed an emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and administrative stay of the district court’s order. It argued that the district court’s “extraordinary relief significantly and unjustifiably intrudes on the President’s constitutional authority to oversee the Executive Branch and the principal officers he must trust to carry out his responsibilities.”

In the motion, Trump relied on his recent victory involving labor official firings:

The Supreme Court recently stayed similar orders for Members of the Merits Systems Protections Board (MSPB) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), recognizing that “the Government is likely to show that both” agencies “exercise considerable executive power,” such that the President “may remove without cause” those agencies’ principal officers. Trump v. Wilcox, 145 S. Ct. 1415, 1415 (2025).

The motion continues that although the Supreme Court in Humphrey’s Executor recognized a limited exception to that rule of at-will firing by the President, it does not encompass the present-day FTC, which exercises substantial executive power in carrying out its wide-ranging duties.

Grant of the motion for stay. On July 21, the same day that the emergency motion was filed, the appellate court granted the emergency motion and administratively stayed the district court’s order.

The case is No. 25-5261.

News: AgencyNews LitigationNewsTrends PublicEmployees