CIT Director J. Joel Alicea was quoted in a recent Fox News Digital article examining two high-stakes Supreme Court cases testing President Trump’s authority to remove federal officials.
The article, titled “Trump’s firing power faces twin Supreme Court tests, but one agency may get special treatment,” analyzes the legal distinctions between Slaughter v. Trump and Trump v. Cook — cases involving the firings of an FTC commissioner and a Federal Reserve governor, respectively.
Prof. Alicea offered insight into the differing legal strategies the Trump administration pursued in each case. He noted that in Slaughter, the administration made an explicit constitutional argument that the president holds broad authority to remove FTC commissioners at will, regardless of statutory restrictions. In Cook, however, the administration took a far more cautious approach, declining to raise that same constitutional challenge given the Federal Reserve’s unique historical and legal standing.
Prof. Alicea also flagged a novel legal question emerging from the Slaughter case: whether federal courts even have the authority to order a president to reinstate a fired agency head, a question he noted has never been directly adjudicated before.
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