The Supreme Court is seen Monday, July 27, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib) Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court held in Trump v. Slaughter that the president may remove at will the heads of so-called independent agencies. The Constitution vests the executive power in the president and charges him with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed. Those provisions, the court reasoned, require presidential control over subordinates exercising executive power and render statutory removal protections unconstitutional.
The same day, however, the court issued Trump v. Cook, which left in place removal protections for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Trump had purported to fire Cook, citing allegations that she had made false statements in connection with a mortgage. The majority opinion relied heavily on a contested historical analogy to earlier national banks and the perceived economic stakes of continued Fed independence.
That decision’s persuasiveness aside, there is broad agreement that monetary policy should be insulated from political actors. We don’t trust politicians to exercise restraint in the face of electoral pressures to juice the economy. Surveying our current office-holding politicians, that is an understandable concern. But perhaps the causal arrow runs in both directions, and our politicians have become less serious partly because we have defined their jobs downward.
By insulating major policymaking from democratic control, as we had done most obviously with independent agencies, we may have weakened our own incentives to demand serious political governance.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Cook makes the consequentialist case for independent monetary policy, citing “the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, warned that “even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political upheaval … as well as turmoil in the U.S. and world economies.” (All that may be true, though Cato Institute scholars have argued persuasively that monetary policy rules, required by Congress, are more important than monetary policy independence.)
At oral argument, Paul Clement (representing Cook) stressed the importance of ensuring “that the markets and the public have faith in the independence of the Fed from the president and from Congress.”
The “ultimate imperative” for the Fed, Clement suggested, “is that the markets don’t think that rates are being lowered for political pressure” but rather for “prudent financial management of our monetary policy.” The unstated premise is that we can’t expect prudence from elected politicians. And fair enough: The appeal of shielding some important decisions from politicians is obvious. Frankly, I wouldn’t want most of them opining on my next snack, much less the national money supply.
But our success in insulating so many levers of power from political control may well enhance our ability to elect, tolerate, or ignore manifestly ridiculous political actors. When the machinery of government most likely to affect everyday American life runs outside politicians’ direct control, voters may discount candidate competence in favor of spectacle or grievance on Election Day. Indeed, it’s not far-fetched to think that primaries and elections for a job that unambiguously included control over monetary policy might have had very different outcomes.
Of course, plenty of critically important federal departments — State, Defense and Justice, to name a few — have always been subject to political control. But while Americans may have strong opinions about the war in Iran or high-profile Justice Department prosecutions, they are far more likely to cite inflation or the economy as the country’s most important problem. Indeed, without “denigrat[ing] any other agency,” Clement suggested that “there’s a reason that the markets watch the Fed a little more closely than they watch really any other agency of government.”
To be sure, technocratic expertise can be critical in crafting policy. But policymaking requires balancing inevitable trade-offs among competing interests, and that balancing calls for judgment — informed by expertise, not supplanted by it. We elect representatives to exercise their judgment on our behalf, rarely for any technical proficiencies. In allowing Congress to give away much of its power — to the executive branch generally and to independent agencies in particular — we may have dulled our incentive to elect the kind of representation we would demand if politicians visibly wielded the power we sense really matters.
We can — and the Constitution’s framers did — structure government institutions to channel and check political ambition, placing some matters, like free speech and religion, entirely beyond democratic reach. But structuring policymaking bodies to circumvent the democratic process engenders a political passivity that undermines the framework of self-government.
The Slaughter ruling took one step toward restoring our constitutional design, which relies on politicians and voters responding to, not obscuring, incentives. Unfortunately, the court’s decision in Cook could blunt what might have the candidate-improving impact of that step by maintaining the electorally protected status of the actors making perhaps the most salient policy decisions for the average American. It’s not that we should forgo serious people in those roles, but we deserve such officers throughout the rest of government, as well.
Molly Nixon is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where she focuses on the scope, use, and history of executive power as well as its limits under the Constitution.
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