r/ChangeTheGovernment

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 29, 2026 in Trump v. Slaughter that President Trump had the constitutional authority to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 91-year-old precedent from 1935 that had protected members of independent federal agencies from presidential removal without cause for nearly a century. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion joined by all five conservative justices, stating that limits on the president’s ability to remove those who exercise executive power on his behalf unconstitutionally infringe on his Article II authority, and that the president may remove his subordinates at will. Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the rare and pointed step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench, a move justices reserve for decisions they consider historically significant and profoundly wrong.

The ruling applies to roughly two dozen independent federal agencies whose leaders previously served fixed terms and could only be removed for cause. The FTC, NLRB, SEC, CFPB, and Federal Reserve Board of Governors are all now subject to at-will presidential removal under the ruling, giving President Trump and every future president direct control over agencies that regulate Wall Street, consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, labor relations, and the broader financial system. Legal scholars describe the ruling as the culmination of the unitary executive theory, the legal doctrine holding that a president must have total control over all executive branch functions, and say it represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the regulatory state in modern American history.

In a separate ruling issued the same day, the Court drew a distinction and held that Trump could not fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, though the legal reasoning behind that carve-out is still being analyzed by constitutional scholars and its precise limits remain unclear. Trump celebrated the Slaughter ruling publicly, saying it “greatly increases” his presidential power. The immediate practical effect is that no commissioner, board member, or director of an independent federal agency can now consider themselves protected from removal if they make a decision the White House opposes.

A joint AP and PBS FRONTLINE investigation published June 30, 2026 found that American technology companies and their infrastructure are being directly abused to power massive fraud operations running out of scam compounds in Myanmar. The investigation was built on tens of thousands of leaked scam center files, videos and photos, an analysis of AI misuse conducted with C4ADS, and interviews with 58 scam victims and three dozen current and former scammers from 19 countries. The compounds operate under the protection of armed militias affiliated with the Myanmar military, where trafficking victims who have been rescued reported torture and beatings.

Scammers inside the compounds are trained to build fake romantic identities using AI tools and are given scripts to make victims fall in love within four days before pivoting to cryptocurrency investment fraud, a method that has turned these compounds into a multibillion dollar global fraud industry. Myanmar’s military launched a high profile demolition of KK Park in October 2025, but the crackdown was largely theater, with devices tracked by investigators moving directly from KK Park to a new facility near Hpakalu, Myanmar in January 2026, where operations simply continued. At least 13 of 25 newly identified scam compounds active between March and June 2026 were found using Starlink IP addresses.

AP found no evidence that any of the named U.S. technology companies were doing anything illegal, meaning the story is about infrastructure abuse rather than corporate wrongdoing, but the investigation raises serious questions about whether American tech platforms have adequate controls to prevent their tools from being weaponized by sanctioned entities running slave labor fraud operations. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army in November 2025 for supporting the compounds, but the scam operations have continued expanding. The investigation is part of an ongoing AP and FRONTLINE collaboration that includes an upcoming PBS documentary.