Attorney General Phil Weiser leads coalition challenging illegal firing of FTC commissioners

April 18, 2025 (DENVER) – Attorney General Phil Weiser led a coalition of 21 attorneys general in supporting two commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission who are challenging the illegal decision by President Trump to fire them without cause.

“The independent, expert, bipartisan makeup of the Federal Trade Commission has been a hallmark of the agency and a key reason why it’s been effective at protecting consumers and ensuring a fair marketplace,” said Weiser. “My fellow attorneys general and I are supporting this lawsuit because we want to ensure the states’ bipartisan partnership with the FTC continues, and that starts with the court ruling that the president’s attempt to fire the commissioners was unlawful.”

For more than 100 years, the FTC has played an important role in consumer protection against scams and fraud, recovering billions of dollars for consumers harmed by unfair and deceptive practices. The agency has also been at the center of important antitrust cases that protect consumers from anticompetitive practices, many of which involved close partnerships with the states, such as the recent lawsuit to stop the merger between Kroger and Albertsons.

That strong track record, the attorneys general argue in their brief, is due in large part to the bipartisan structure of the agency’s leadership, which fosters well-reasoned decision making and provides expertise that many state attorneys general rely on to do their work.

Allowing this decision to stand would destroy the FTC’s structure and harm its mission. Allowing the president to have at-will removal authority would ruin the FTC’s independence by allowing the commission to become a partisan agency subject to the political whims of the president. Conversely, the president could end up firing all of the commissioners, leaving the FTC rudderless and unable to perform its function.

Read the amicus brief filed today in Slaughter v. Trump (PDF download).

Other attorneys general joining Weiser in filing the brief are Anne Lopez of Hawai’i, Kwame Raoul of Illinois, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and Nick Brown of Washington, as well as the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

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