Melissa Holyoak, United States Attorney for the District of Utah, was a Republican commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission in 2025 when President Donald Trump sent a letter to her Democratic colleagues, Alvaro Bedoya and Melissa Slaughter, firing them.
Slaughter sued the president and the remaining sitting FTC commissioners for firing her without statutory cause.
The case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where a 6-3 majority sided with Trump in June, but before that, lower courts reinstated Slaughter twice.
Holyoak said those short periods when Slaughter was back in the office created “tremendous chaos” within the FTC.
In his majority opinion for Trump v. Slaughter, Chief Justice John Roberts labeled the Federal Trade Commission a “headless fourth branch” that held “considerable executive power.”
“To vest ‘the whole executive power’ in just one person was not to suggest that he could execute the laws alone and unaided,” he wrote. ”But it was to establish a hierarchy — a ‘Chief Magistrate’ with whom the buck stops, and below him various ‘assistants or deputies’ who ‘derive their offices from his appointment’ and remain ‘subject to his superintendence.’”
The Supreme Court embraced a central tenet of the unitary executive theory, ruling that officials who exercise executive power must ultimately be subject to the president’s control and removal.
Since then, “I think there’s been a lot of talk about, ‘oh, the sky is falling. You know, this is so different, and all of these agencies are going to fail or crumble,’” Holyoak said during a conversation held by the Federalist Society in Salt Lake City on Wednesday.
“I think the answer is ‘no,’ and how do we know that? Because we have lived the last 18 months after President Trump fired Bedoya and Slaughter, Chairman Ferguson has led the FTC and has led it under a unitary executive, and has led it by directing the administration’s priorities,” she added.
But what comes next?
Holyoak was a guest speaker alongside law professor and former Solicitor General of Texas Aaron Nielson.
He said the Supreme Court’s work isn’t finished with this issue.
The FTC is an independent federal agency established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its mission is to protect American consumers from “unfair methods of competition through law enforcement, advocacy, research, and education.”
To separate the FTC’s goals from executive political pressure, the law limited the president’s ability to remove a commissioner to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But in June, the Supreme Court effectively threw that provision out the window.
Giving the president greater control over previously independent agencies creates its own danger unless the court also limits the powers those agencies possess, Nielson said.
“Now that we’ve empowered the president, what’s to stop the executive branch from some future administration from siccing all of government on somebody?”
He said the concern wouldn’t necessarily stop with the Justice Department. A future president could potentially exert control across multiple agencies — including the DOJ and Federal Communications Commission — while also controlling in-house administrative adjudications.
The Supreme Court needs to “finish the job” by further constraining administrative power, Nielson said, “I think that’s going to be the next big issue for the next five years of the court.”
In his concurring opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Neil Gorsuch said he agreed fully with Roberts’ opinion, but cautioned that he couldn’t “ignore the implications that follow.”
“Today, independent agencies do not just exercise executive law-enforcement powers. Congress has also delegated to them vast legislative and judicial powers, effectively allowing these agencies to make laws and decide disputes under them. And, after today’s decision,” he said.
Gorsuch continued, “Would Congress have delegated so much power, including legislative and judicial power, to independent agencies had it known that the President would come to control them? How will Congress respond now — if realistically it can? And what, if anything, will this Court do about it?”
Proponents of the unitary executive theory generally argue this is a constitutional principle, not a Trump-specific power — meaning the same authority recognized in Trump v. Slaughter belongs to the next Democratic president.
But Nielson told the Deseret News that “this isn’t a Republican or a Democrat issue. It is about how powerful the federal government should be,” and that Gorsuch’s focus was on “ways to curtail federal power that would apply equally depending on who is in the White House.”
Will the FTC remain bipartisan?
The agency is headed by five commissioners nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, who then serve seven-year terms, and no more than three can be from the same political party.
Slaughter and Bedoya’s seats in the FTC have yet to be filled, and Holyoak noted that after Trump v. Slaughter, the question remains whether or not presidents will continue appointing commissioners from the opposing party.
“The really interesting question is: Do we return to a bipartisan commission?”
She cited the Reagan and Clinton administrations as examples of the problems created when holdover commissioners prevented incoming presidents from obtaining ideological majorities.
“This is political, and why we need this power is so that the president can actually enforce and execute on his priorities,” she said.
Whether Trump will appoint two Democrats “remains to be seen.”