The current chairman of the FTC says that the president has the authority to remove commissioners.
Two Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said on Tuesday they have been removed from the commission.
Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter announced their removals in separate statements. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also issued a statement on their firings.
“This is outrageous. President Trump’s dismissal of Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya is not only illegal but also hurts consumers by undermining an independent agency that Congress established to protect consumers from fraud, scams, and monopoly power,” Klobuchar
said in a statement.
The senator said that the FTC is now being “threatened” by the administration and cannot do its “critical work,” which will “empower fraudsters and monopolists, and consumers will pay the price.”
The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws and has a bipartisan structure where no more than three of the five commissioners can come from the same party. Both Bedoya and Slaughter have indicated they will file a lawsuit to reverse the firings.
“This is corruption plain and simple,” Bedoya
said in a March 18 statement on social media platform X, adding that President Donald Trump “illegally fired” him.
Slaughter also released a statement, saying, “The President illegally fired me from my position as a Federal Trade Commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent.”
The Epoch Times contacted the White House for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, a Republican appointed to the commission last year and who was appointed by Trump as its chairman after he took office,
said on Tuesday that he has “no doubts” about Trump’s constitutional authority to remove commissioners from the FTC. He said such a move may be “necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government.”
“The Federal Trade Commission will continue its tireless work to protect consumers, lower prices, and police anticompetitive behavior,” Ferguson said.
Since taking office, Trump has removed members of various governing boards and agencies, sparking lawsuits. Two federal judges in Washington have said Trump’s firing of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board Member Cathy Harris violated federal law.
Earlier this week, a U.S. appeals court panel
appeared to be sympathetic to the Trump administration’s decisions to remove Harris and Wilcox, during a hearing in Washington. Judges Justin Walker and Karen Henderson asked questions indicating they were skeptical of arguments from Harris’s and Wilcox’s attorneys.
Trump also has moved to terminate the employment of tens of thousands of federal employees, moves that have also drawn several lawsuits. On Monday, a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
ruled 2–1 that it would not immediately block a lower court judge’s order that mandated the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers.
Separately, the Merit Systems Protection Board earlier this month
issued an order to block the firings of thousands of federal workers.
Reuters contributed to this report.
