The Supreme Court has taken up a case that could fundamentally alter the balance of power between the president and independent federal agencies, potentially granting the executive branch greater authority to remove officials who operate outside direct presidential control. This development stems from President Trump’s decision to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a holdover from the Biden administration, prompting a legal challenge that now invites the court to reconsider the 1935 precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
In that earlier ruling, the Supreme Court determined that President Franklin D. Roosevelt lacked the authority to dismiss FTC Commissioner William Humphrey solely for policy disagreements, reasoning that the FTC performed quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, not purely executive ones. This decision has long shielded commissioners at agencies like the FTC from at-will removal, allowing them to serve fixed terms—seven years in the FTC’s case—unless proven guilty of inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance. Critics argue this setup creates unaccountable pockets within the executive branch, where officials can pursue agendas detached from the elected president’s direction.
Hans von Spakovsky, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, captures this concern vividly: “The Constitution says the president is the head of the executive branch,” von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital. “That means, just like the CEO of a big corporation, they get to supervise and run the entire corporation, or in this case, the entire executive branch, and you can’t have Congress taking parts of that away from him and saying, ‘Well, they’re going to keep doing executive branch things, including law enforcement, but you won’t have any control over them.’”
His analogy points to a core constitutional principle: the president’s role as the singular leader of the executive demands the ability to ensure alignment across all agencies. Without this, fragmented authority could lead to inconsistent enforcement of laws, where unelected bureaucrats wield significant power without direct oversight from the White House. This fragmentation, von Spakovsky implies, dilutes the democratic accountability that comes from electing a president to steer the government’s course.
The current case arose when Trump, upon returning to office, removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, in March 2025, citing the need to realign the FTC with his administration’s priorities. Slaughter contested the move, invoking the FTC Act and Humphrey’s Executor to argue her dismissal was unlawful without cause.
In a 6-3 emergency order issued on September 22, 2025, the Supreme Court permitted the firing to stand temporarily while agreeing to hear the merits, signaling a willingness to probe the limits of presidential removal power. This step follows a pattern of recent court actions, including a shadow docket ruling earlier in the year on labor board firings, where the justices distinguished the Federal Reserve as a unique entity but left room for broader application.
Joshua Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, anticipates wide ripple effects if the court narrows or overturns Humphrey’s: “I think this ruling will necessarily reach beyond the FTC,” Blackman said. “The only question is whether they maintain that the Federal Reserve is different.”
Expanding on this, a decision favoring expanded removal authority could extend to other multi-member commissions, such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission, where statutory protections currently insulate members from presidential whims.
For agencies enforcing regulations on everything from antitrust to consumer protection, this shift might enable quicker policy reversals, reducing the inertia that often plagues bureaucratic structures. Yet, as Blackman notes, the Federal Reserve’s status—described in court opinions as “quasi-private” with historical roots in early central banking—might carve out an exception, preserving its independence amid concerns over monetary policy stability.
This push aligns with the unitary executive theory, which asserts that the president holds complete control over the executive branch to fulfill constitutional duties. Proponents view it as essential for efficient governance, arguing that divided authority hampers the president’s ability to implement the will of the voters. Chief Justice John Roberts echoed this in a 2020 ruling on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, writing that the president’s power “to remove — and thus supervise — those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text of Article II.”
He added that the CFPB’s “novel” structure defied that presidential power because a single director oversees an agency that “wield[s] significant executive power.” Applying this logic to the FTC could dismantle barriers that allow agencies to operate as semi-autonomous entities, potentially curbing overreach in areas like regulatory enforcement.
As the court prepares for arguments in December 2025, the outcome could reshape the administrative landscape, empowering future presidents to more readily dismantle entrenched bureaucracies. For those frustrated with regulatory overreach, this represents an opportunity to restore executive accountability and streamline government operations, ensuring that agencies serve the president’s vision without undue insulation from electoral consequences.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.