This week’s Supreme Court ruling giving President Donald Trump a free hand in firing government regulators is less about Trump than it is about President Woodrow Wilson. In the text of Trump v. Slaughter and its various concurrences and dissents, I count 15 Trump mentions compared to 23 for Wilson. Partly that’s because no brief to enlarge presidential power will benefit from too close a look at the crazy bastard slumped in the Oval Office today. But mostly it’s because the high court wants to repudiate a set of good-government principles associated with the Progressive era and articulated in some detail by the twenty-eighth president. In the right’s political typology, Wilson is the snake in the garden of limited government who proffered the shiny red apple of the administrative state. Trump v. Slaughter is meant to drive a stake through Wilson’s undead heart.
These days, liberals aren’t too crazy about Woodrow Wilson, either, because of his appalling white supremacist views and his 1913 directive to segregate Black and white employees in the federal workforce, which led to wholesale firings and demotions of Black employees and was a catastrophe for Washington’s fledgling Black middle class. Princeton took Wilson’s name off its School of Public and International Affairs in 2020, and in 2022 the District of Columbia took Wilson’s name off a high school built atop the ruins of Reno City, a Black neighborhood that federal authorities wiped off the map in the 1930s. I can’t quarrel with either decision. But life is complicated, and Wilson also helped bequeath a valuable legacy of government policy that drew on expertise and dispassionate analysis. Liberals take that legacy for granted, but conservatives have lately made that hard to do.
Liberal distaste for Wilson pales in comparison to conservatism’s loathing of the man. Wilson “ushered in a new view of government,” Charlie Kirk said in a February 2025 podcast. “That we’re gonna have these in-de-pen-dent agencies that exist regardless of political pressure.… He wanted to have these agencies be permanent. A tech-no-cratic class untouchable by the sovereign, untouchable by we the people.” The right’s Wilson-hating cult is about 20 years old and was first popularized by the former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. “I have to tell you,” Beck said at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.… He gives us the Fed.” (True.) “He gives us the income tax.” (That was really more President William Howard Taft, a Republican.) “Prohibition. So, he took away the alcohol.” (False. Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and then Congress overrode him.)
Wilson did much less to invent the administrative state than his enemies profess. Only two major agencies were created on his watch. By contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, created the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Corporations (forerunner to the Federal Trade Commission), the Food and Drug Administration, the Labor Department, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. In truth, the administrative state evolved, starting in the nineteenth century, alongside the growing power of industry, as a necessary check on that power.
What makes Wilson a favored target is that, as a political scientist, he wrote favorably about such developments. In his 1886 essay “The Study of Administration,” Wilson observed that democratic governance “does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping necessarily consists in cooking dinner with one’s own hands.” (Before you call this aristo presumption, recall that Wilson was writing at a time when middle-class families frequently employed full-time cooks.) “The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.” In much the same way, civil servants with expertise in various technical matters should be given leeway to make regulatory decisions, with political appointees and the public, of course, looking over their shoulders.
Trump v. Slaughter repudiates that notion as antidemocratic. Previously, a subset of regulatory agencies called independent agencies, acting in quasi-judicial fashion and with top presidential appointees (typically a five-person panel) affiliated with both political parties, was protected from excessive partisan interference by legislative language stipulating that the president could remove these top officials only for cause. Nobody, including the high court, thought these independent agencies acted independent of politics. Because a majority of top slots were reserved for the president’s party, a Democratic Federal Trade Commission or National Labor Relations Board or Merit Systems Protection Board ruled differently than a Republican one. But the differences were somewhat muted and these independent agencies operated within an atmosphere of comparative professionalism; outright partisan hackery was frowned upon. And because the members had fixed (usually five-year) terms, there were no opportunities for empire building along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign at the FBI.
That world is now gone, because under Trump v. Slaughter the president can fire any of these officials if he opposes their politics or suspects them of disloyalty. The same groveling demonstrations of loyalty to Trump that we see Cabinet secretaries put on nauseating display in photo ops will now be required of agencies tasked with protecting consumers, workers, investors, voters, and so on.
What has this got to do with Woodrow Wilson? Justice Neil Gorsuch—the biggest Wilson-hater on the high court—explains in his concurring opinion to Slaughter that Wilson belonged to a group of scholars who, inspired by what Gorsuch sneeringly describes as “the perceived competence of the Prussian bureaucracy,” called for bringing to American government “the utmost possible efficiency.” Central to this project was the hiring of scientific and technical experts and shielding them from excessive political control. But “those in charge of these new agencies often became very difficult to dislodge.”
No, they didn’t. They served fixed terms, and whenever a president of the opposite party came in, they lost majority status. Gorsuch’s real beef with independent agencies isn’t that they operate beyond presidential control but that they exist at all:
Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the Nation’s affairs. They regulate our businesses, and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. They determine what toys our children will play with and how we interact with each other at work.… Often, these agencies do all this with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority.
Translation: Repeal the Progressive era!
The majority opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, mentions Wilson by name only to acknowledge Wilson’s firing of a Portland, Oregon, postmaster, which occasioned the Supreme Court’s decision in Myers v. United States (1926), which voided a statutory requirement that Wilson had to secure Senate approval for such dismissals, which the high court argues should have prevented independent agencies from enjoying the job protection the Supreme Court now invalidates. But Wilson and the Progressive movement are doubtless what Roberts has in mind when he writes, “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection)’ does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance [italics mine].” The high court wants you to know that no such techno-paradise exists. It’s uniquely galling to be lectured on the phoniness of expertise by a legal expert whom the president cannot fire.
But it would be untrue to say the high court rejects Wilson’s vision of technocratic governance in every nonjudicial context. On the same day it handed down Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court also handed down Trump v. Cook, which says the president can’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook because … I still can’t understand why not. I draw some comfort from the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion to Trump v. Slaughter (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), can’t understand it, either:
For most agencies, the majority here says, removal protections like the FTC’s make the President’s job “impossible” and so are unlawful. For [the Fed], however, the Court recognizes that the Founders were acutely aware “of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy” and that they therefore “guaranteed [such agencies] independence from Presidential control.” … What is unclear is why these principles should be limited only to agencies, like the Federal Reserve, that in some respects influence “monetary policy.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, coming from the opposite ideological direction, writes in her dissent to Trump v. Cook that she too can’t figure out this inconsistency:
The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “sanctioned by history” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?
Answer: It can’t. As is so often the case, it falls to the women to call bullshit on the men. But Wilson gets the last laugh because, as Glenn Beck rightly pointed out, Wilson signed into law the legislation that created the Federal Reserve. When it comes to protecting your 401(k), we’re all Wilsonians.
