• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 26, 2025

Former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democrat, confirmed to lawmakers on Wednesday that she will challenge President Donald Trump's attempt to oust her from the agency.

“I am the second FTC Commissioner in 120 years that a president has purported to fire,” she said in prepared remarks to a House panel.

“I will not be the first to go down without a fight, and neither will Commissioner Bedoya,” she added, referring to Democratic former commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was also fired last week from the five-member agency. Her remarks came at the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing "The World Wild Web: Examining Harms Online."

Slaughter noted in her written testimony that the law establishing the FTC calls for a bipartisan board, with no more than three commissioners from the same party. That law also specifies that the commissioners can only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The Supreme Court upheld those restrictions in 1935, when former President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to fire an FTC commissioner. The court unanimously ruled at the time that the president could only expel a commissioner for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

“Commissioner Bedoya and I will be challenging our illegal removals and working to vindicate the law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court because we care deeply about the honesty and integrity of the Commission’s work and how it affects the American people,” she said.

She added that Trump's move sent the “clear message” to the FTC's two remaining commissioners that they “now work under the shadow of arbitrary removal.”

Slaughter also suggested that expelling Democrats from the commission would result in fewer dissenting opinions, noting that current chair Andrew Ferguson, a Republican, recently boasted that he authored more than 400 pages of dissents during the prior administration. 

“The presence of minority commissioners at the FTC lets us provide you, our Congressional overseers, with views into our work,” she said. “It is essential for accountability. This was true for the minority Commissioners in the last administration, whose views and dissents shaped our work for the better, just as Congress intended.”