President Trump wants to be done with Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, the two Democratic members of the FTC whom he fired in March in disregard of the law. But the commissioners show no interest in giving him any such satisfaction.
“The email purporting to fire us did not show any cause,” Slaughter told Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, in a live recording for Patel’s Decoder podcast at the privacy trade group IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit. “The statute says we can only be removed for cause.”
Slaughter, who reminded the audience that Trump appointed her in 2018, and Bedoya said they did not get any “you’re fired” call. Instead, both received emails from a lower-level White House official while they were at events for their kids—a drama club for her, a gymnastics class for him.
The two are challenging that attempted firing and voiced confidence in their cause, citing the clear language of the Federal Trade Commission Act and a 1935 unanimous holding by the Supreme Court that presidents can only fire FTC members for the causes allowed in that statute.
“This is not a complicated case,” Slaughter said, adding that she would be “shocked” if a district court ignored 90 years of precedent.
Patel, Slaughter, and Bedoya (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Patel asked if they had the same confidence in the Supreme Court, which in last year’s Trump v. United States ruling granted an extraordinary degree of legal immunity to presidents that is not described in the Constitution.
“Sure, I think we do,” Bedoya replied, saying that the results of this case would have effects far beyond his and Slaughter’s continued employment.
(When Patel introduced them at the start of this roughly 45-minute session as “former” commissioners, Bedoya disagreed, leading the editor to try a different adjective: “liminal.”)
“It is about independent commissions like our own being able to serve without fear or favor,” Bedoya said. By that he meant not only the likes of the FTC, FCC, SEC, and FDIC, which Trump declared subject to his control in a February executive order, but even the Federal Reserve, whose chairman, Jerome Powell, has become a target of Trump’s verbal tantrums.
“These are bedrock institutions of our financial life,” Bedoya said. “Can markets rely on the stability that they provide?”
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Patel then asked about a recent statement from FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson that he would obey a “lawful” direction from the president to drop an antitrust case like the one proceeding against Meta. “Who is being served by that loyalty?” Bedoya responded. His description of Trump’s attitude towards appointees: “If you obey, you will stay, and if you don’t you won’t.”
Bedoya was equally critical of Mark Zuckerberg’s obvious attempts to cozy up to the Trump administration, which have yet to slow the FTC’s case against Meta. In any other administration, Zuckerberg’s donation-greased lobbying “would be front-page news for days” and “considered wildly inappropriate,” he said.
Slaughter’s take: “Bribery is bad, even if it doesn’t work.”
The two declined to speak in too much detail about what they wanted to see happen from the FTC’s case against Meta as well as a separate action against Amazon. Slaughter did, however, put in a more general endorsement of “structural” relief (antitrust-speak for a forced breakup of a company) versus having regulators write conduct rules that they then must enforce.
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“I actually think structural remedies are a much more small-c conservative approach because they keep governments out of businesses,” she said.
She also endorsed Congress passing a comprehensive privacy bill while acknowledging that Congress has a long streak of failing to do that: “Everything is impossible until it’s a law.”
But in the meantime, Slaughter warned, Trump administration moves to exploit existing stores of government data for such purposes as finding undocumented immigrants both erode the government’s authority to lead on privacy and invite European retaliation that could leave US companies shut out of existing transatlantic data-privacy frameworks.
The commissioner’s forecast: “It will really penalize US businesses.”
Because no tech-policy panel seems complete without a discussion of AI, Patel closed out with a question about some of the more outlandish promises being made about AI’s potential, such as claims that AI systems could replace doctors and teachers. Bedoya’s scathing verdict: “That is idiocy!”
Slaughter reminded the audience that the FTC has always had the authority to police misleading claims: “There is no AI exception to the law.”
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This article was published by WTVG on 2025-04-24 13:30:00
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