President Trump has spent the first months of his presidency upending long-standing norms, from firing commissioners of independent agencies to ramping up tariffs against U.S. allies and rivals alike. But there is one line he hasn’t crossed: firing the head of the central bank. This week, though, new developments have raised fears that Trump could take the once unthinkable step of dismissing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
On Thursday, Trump issued a tirade on his social media platform, Truth Social, blasting the Fed chair as always “too late and wrong” about cutting interest rates, adding: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
Meanwhile, a new report claims Trump has been privately telling aides he wants to remove Powell before his term expires in a year. Powell has said he would not resign if Trump asked. All of this sets up a potential legal showdown that could upend nearly a century of legal and political precedent—and that critics fear would destroy confidence in the U.S. economy. To understand what’s at stake, Fortune asked law professors and policy experts for their view on an explosive issue that is fast making its way to the Supreme Court.
What is Humphrey’s Executor?
Trump, whose recent outburst came after a Powell speech stating that tariffs could exacerbate inflation, has not taken formal steps to dismiss the Fed chair. But he has fired commissioners from other independent agencies that fall under the executive branch, including the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. These moves come as a direct challenge to a nearly century-old precedent, where a unanimous Supreme Court, in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not remove the heads of an independent agency without a good reason such as neglect or wrongdoing.
“That’s a really foundational Supreme Court precedent,” said Hayley Durudogan, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “It’s been used as the backbone for a lot of independent agency developments.”
The conservative legal movement, though, has for decades worked to chip away at the ruling, putting forth a “unitary executive” theory, which claims the president must have broad power over the executive branch of government—including over its various agencies.
The movement has had some success. In a 2020 ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed Humphrey’s Executor by finding that presidents can remove heads of agencies that do not have multimember commissions, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Oliver Dunford is a senior attorney at the right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation, which has petitioned the top court to fully revisit Humphrey’s Executor, in part because the power of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission has expanded since the original decision, allowing them to carry out more executive functions. He told Fortune that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the case, saying that “President Trump may change the calculus somewhat, but I think it was definitely moving in that direction.”
Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University, is not so sure, arguing that Humphrey’s Executor has been a “fundamental part of the way our government operates.”
“It just happens that we’re living through a moment in time in which a bunch of movement judges have captured the Supreme Court and are trying to implement a political theory that has been roundly rejected for most of American history,” he told Fortune.
Is the Fed different?
During the first few months of his second term, Trump’s removal of a number of commissioners from different agencies has created a collision course with the Supreme Court. Still, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, argued that these moves are consistent with a decades-old position of the conservative legal movement that holds the president has broad authority to remove subordinate executive officers. “What’s distinctive about the president is that he is willing to test this legal question,” Alicea told Fortune.
Firing Powell, however, would be a separate matter altogether. According to Dunford, the question of whether the Federal Reserve should be treated like other independent agencies, such as the FTC, remains murky. “To be perfectly frank, I don’t think anyone has a unified theory of why the Fed is different, but we do think there’s something different about it,” he said.
That difference could be rooted in the historical governance structure of the predecessor organizations to the Federal Reserve, the First and Second Banks of the United States, or in the type of power that the Fed wields. Still, Dunford said that even if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, it would likely narrow the scope of the decision to say it did not extend to the question of whether the president can fire the Fed chair. Even Dunford, who has argued that Humphrey’s Executor should be overturned, said that he does not believe the Fed should be included.
NYU’s Rosenblum, however, argues that any attempts by the conservative legal movement to differentiate the Federal Reserve from independent agencies have been “scholastic exercises in trying to invest distinctions.” He said that overturning Humphrey’s Executor would likely put the independence of the Fed at risk. “Even the most presidentialist reactionaries are aware that it would be an economic disaster,” he told Fortune.
One case involving Humphrey’s Executor has already reached the Supreme Court. It turns on Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the NLRB, who persuaded a federal court to reinstate her after Trump removed her from the agency. After an appeals court kept that decision in place, the White House turned to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to put the reinstatement on hold until the court has an opportunity to consider the arguments in full later this year.
Legal experts say it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will issue a full decision on the NLRB case—including whether it will overturn Humphrey’s Executor—before its current term expires this summer. That means it could be months until a final ruling is issued, though the Supreme Court could block Wilcox from returning to her post in the interim.
Even if the Supreme Court does use the NLRB case to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, it would likely remain unclear if that ruling extended to the Federal Reserve. That, of course, would not preclude Trump from firing Powell—it would just mean that the legal challenges are only beginning. Those would likely include an emergency petition to temporarily keep Powell in his job.
Some legal scholars have argued that the Supreme Court has kept Humphrey’s Executor in place specifically because of fears over the Federal Reserve’s independence. But with Trump now threatening to fire Powell, Rosenblum described the possibility as a “chickens coming home to roost moment.”
“The Supreme Court has been willing to expand the power of the presidency in many spheres,” he said. “But obviously the Supreme Court, more so than the current administration, remains concerned about old-fashioned rule of law values, and they may also be concerned about destabilizing the American economy.”
