• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 19, 2025

More than two dozen Democratic senators urged President Donald Trump to rescind his decision to fire Federal Trade Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya.

The ouster “contradicts long standing Supreme Court precedent, undermines Congress’s constitutional authority to create bipartisan, independent commissions, and upends more than 110 years of work at the FTC to protect consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power,” Senators Maria Cantwell (Washington), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) and others said Wednesday in a letter to Trump.

“When establishing the FTC, Congress lawfully exercised its power to establish a bipartisan, multi-member, expert commission and to shield that commission from political pressure by allowing commissioners to serve 7-year terms and limiting the President’s power to remove commissioners only 'for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,'” the lawmakers write.

“As Commissioners duly appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya must be allowed to continue their work at the Commission,” the senators add.

The letter comes one day after Trump fired the Democratic commissioners, leaving the FTC with just two members, both Republican.

Bedoya and Slaughter have said they plan to challenge the firings in court.

“The statute that governs the FTC is very clear that commissioners can only be removed for cause -- for neglect, malfeasance or inefficiency -- and the President did not allege any of those things on my part or Commissioner Bedoya's part,” Slaughter said Wednesday in an interview with CNBC.

The Supreme Court was faced with a similar situation in 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to fire an FTC commissioner. The court unanimously ruled in that case that the president could only oust a commissioner for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.