Supreme Court grants Trump the ability to fire the refs — and crypto's favorite scorekeepers just became optional 🎯

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that President Donald Trump can fire commissioners at independent federal agencies at will, overturning nearly a century of precedent and expanding executive authority over regulators that oversee the cryptocurrency industry. The decision in Trump v. Slaughter affirmed the president's right to terminate Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic FTC commissioner, and clarified that the same power extends to other agencies — with Federal Reserve governors as the lone exception. Trump called it "the greatest increase in presidential power in the last 100 years" in a social media post, adding: "Such a monumental ruling at such an important time!"

The ruling carries direct implications for the SEC and CFTC, the two financial regulators with primary jurisdiction over digital assets. Trump has already reshaped both bodies by declining to appoint Democratic commissioners, leaving the SEC with three Republican commissioners and zero Democrats, and the CFTC with only a lone Republican chairman. Both agencies are statutorily required to feature two minority-party commissioners. Slaughter's husband is Vice President of policy at Paradigm, a venture firm focused on crypto and one of the industry's largest investors, and the couple's financial arrangement funded the lawsuit through its Supreme Court appeal, Decrypt previously reported.

The decision lands in the middle of a legislative fight over the Clarity Act, a bill that would formally legalize most crypto activity in the United States and grant the SEC and CFTC broad authority over digital asset markets. Senate Democrats had conditioned their support on Trump appointing members of their party to both agencies. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act to a full Senate vote, but during the floor vote Thursday, only two Democrats — Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) — broke ranks to support the bill. In December, Trump told Decrypt he was "open" to naming Democratic commissioners, though he has not done so in the six months since.

With the Slaughter precedent now overturned, Trump retains full discretion to leave the seats vacant, fill them with his own nominees, or remove sitting commissioners, consolidating executive-branch influence over agencies long viewed as independent arbiters of market conduct. The ruling does not alter the statutory requirement that the SEC and CFTC each include minority-party commissioners, but it eliminates the previous legal guardrails that prevented presidents from dismissing those commissioners without cause.