President Donald Trump’s controversial firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily signal that major enforcement or policy changes are in the pipeline at the agency, a former Republican FTC chairman said.

Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, who served as Democratic commissioners until recently, filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing Trump of illegally firing them without cause, setting up a legal battle that could wind up at the Supreme Court.

“I think the dismissal is part of a larger effort to make a point about the capacity of the president to dismiss members of regulatory commissions,” William Kovacic, who chaired the FTC during the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview.

According to the complaint, Trump’s move violates the FTC Act and is at odds with a precedent set by the high court in its 1935 Humphrey's Executor v. U.S. decision. In that case, the court found that commissioners at independent agencies cannot be fired at will.

“I’m not convinced that the [Supreme Court] is destined to cast aside that protection, but it’s easy to see how there could be the votes on the court to do it,” said Kovacic, who is currently a George Washington University law professor.

Slaughter and Bedoya have been added to a former FTC commissioners list posted on the agency’s website. An agency spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The five-seat commission is now operating with just two members, both Republican: Andrew Ferguson, who serves as chair, and Melissa Holyoak.

Trump has nominated Mark Meador, an antitrust lawyer and former agency staffer, to become a third FTC Republican, filling a seat that was already vacant before the recent controversy.

The 2-2 political split on the commission prior to Slaughter and Bedoya leaving meant that Republicans were forced to agree with Democrats to avoid any deadlocks pending Meador’s confirmation by the Senate.

“I don’t think there’s anything in the decision-making queue at the FTC right now that required the immediate dismissal of Bedoya and Slaughter, because the Republicans would have gotten a third vote soon anyway,” Kovacic said. 

As a minority commissioner during the Biden administration, Ferguson had strong disagreements with Democrats, including in a 3-2 partly-line vote last year to approve rules banning the use of noncompete agreements. Those rules were subsequently challenged in court and eventually blocked.

Ferguson, now in the majority and empowered as chairman, is expected to push for a rollback of at least some Biden-era antitrust and consumer protection policies. But he has also signaled a willingness to maintain the status quo in some cases. Last month, for example, the agency announced that Biden-era merger guidelines “are in effect and will serve as the framework for the FTC’s merger-review analysis.”

The new chairman has also vowed to “vigorously” challenge anticompetive mergers and indicated that he will continue the agency’s crackdown on big tech companies.

Had Bedoya and Slaughter remained at the FTC, disagreements with Ferguson may have come up, but their ability to stop him from achieving his agenda would have ended upon Meador’s arrival, Kovacic said.

Meador’s nomination was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on March 12. It now awaits a vote from the full Senate. 

“I’m assuming that the Senate gets to that relatively soon,” Kovacic said. “I don’t know if some senators will seek to delay that because they’re opposed to the dismissal of Bedoya and Slaughter.”

Christopher Sagers, a Cleveland State University law professor, said he doesn’t expect the removal of the Democratic commissioners to seriously impact the day-to-day work of the FTC.

“This is an issue of historic significance having nothing to do with pending cases,” Sagers said in an email. “By statute the president cannot fire FTC commissioners except ‘for cause,’ and I doubt that these people were alleged to have violated their duties in a way that supports for-cause termination. So, everyone assumes that this is a deliberate step to set up a constitutional challenge that the White House expects to win, in which it hopes that the Supreme Court will hold ‘for cause’ termination rules in agency appointment statutes unconstitutional.”

Trump is also facing court challenges over his removals of Democrats at other independent agencies, such as the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board.

Bedoya and Slaughter both received an email from the White House on March 18 saying they had been terminated “effective immediately,” with no legal cause provided, according to their complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

The complaint calls on the court to declare Trump’s action unlawful and allow the commissioners to resume their service at the FTC.

“This is a naked power grab on behalf of the president, and it's going to open the door for corruption and corporate giveaways, I think, for his top donors,” Bedoya said in an NPR interview last week.

Slaughter has asserted that Trump fired her because he was “afraid” of her voice as a minority commissioner.

“Removing opposition voices may not change what the Trump majority can do, but it does change whether they will have accountability when they do it,” she said in an emailed statement last week. “The administration clearly fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide if the President orders Chairman Ferguson to treat the most powerful corporations and their executives — like those that flanked the President at his inauguration — with kid gloves.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email that Trump “has the lawful authority to manage personnel within the executive branch.”

“President Trump will continue to rid the federal government of bad actors unaligned with his common sense agenda the American people decisively voted for,” she added.

At a press conference last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made similar comments in response to a question about Slaughter and Bedoya, saying “the time was right to let these people go, and the president absolutely has the authority to do it.” The administration is prepared to “fight it all the way to the Supreme Court,” she said.

Trump’s move has prompted an outcry from advocacy groups and congressional Democrats.

“This action contradicts long standing Supreme Court precedent, undermines Congress’s constitutional authority to create bipartisan, independent commissions and upends more than 110 years of work at the FTC to protect consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power,” a group of Senate Democrats said in a letter to Trump last week. “We urge you to rescind these dismissals so the FTC can get back to the people’s work.”