The Supreme Court confirmed on July 23, 2025, that there is no such thing as an independent federal agency. including consumer protection agencies, and that Trump could fire their board, their policy setters, and administrative rule makers, and replace them with those who were loyal to what Trump wanted. Supreme Court allows Trump to fire 3 Democratic consumer product safety commissioners | PBS News , Supreme Court sides with Trump administration in battle over ability to remove agency commissioners - SCOTUSblog This and other consumer oriented protection agencies can no longer be trusted to give information and issue rules in the public interest and public good, but they now can be influenced to provide rationales and twisted data and facts to suit the President's oratory and tweets. The court ruling clears the way to do the same to any other "independent" agency, firing for any reason, or no reason or without cause. their boards and directors, and to replace them with Trump loyalists who will do what is in his political interest. Agencies are to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil if the evil is data, scientific research, and rule-making that makes Trump look bad All of this is happening in the first six months of the second Trump presidency, a profound whiplash in what once was a 250-year history of prior presidents taking seriously their Constitutional charge to "faithfully execute the laws of the land".
The speed with which this has happened appears to be an overall Trump regime strategy to do what they can to grab as much power for the president before any court tells him no, or that it creeps under the radar of journalists and consumers who are focused elsewhere, with everything everywhere happening at once. Why anti-consumer protections easily escape immediate notice is that the public is not aware until too many of them are ripped off, are seriously damaged, or are killed.
Trump's goal is becoming clear: to make sure that either embarrassing facts that contradicted his view of anything did not come to light or were ignored. It is affecting many agencies upon which ordinary people rely, whether it has to do with weather forecasting and impact on global warming, product safety warnings and rules, or the use of expertise to set monetary policy and interest rates. Killing the messenger or appointing political loyalists to fix a danger to ordinary Americans can no longer be trusted to deliver their expertise based on facts and data, and that is not based on political interests.. Not only are their findings not to be trusted, but the decisions made at the executive and legislative levels could rely on potentially flawed data: garbage in, garbage out. The best analogy to this kill the messenger policy is not original with me, but it is like when a patient gets a diagnosis of cancer, but fires the doctor. See? Cancer went away.
Update 8/4/2025 As Argentina, Greece, and even China have found out, distorting data for political purposes is also a danger to the economy. Data concerning national debt and inflation were ignored or changed to make the leadership look better. Argentia and Greece eventually went bankrupt. Trump's attempt to force the Fed chair to report the inflation rates he wanted and Trump's firing the data collector of unemployment statistics to get "his" person in place is a clear and present danger to the economy of our country. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/trump-bls-firing-economic-reports.html#:~:text=There%20is%20the
The dictator of Turkey tried to mess around with independently supplied data and the central bank (the Fed is US's central bank) and nearly crashed his economy. He reversed himself, and the Turkish economy is healing. A Cautionary Turkish Economic Tale | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
Other consumer protection agencies have been virtually closed down and unable to function, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to handle consumer complaints and to prevent the abuses that resulted in the 2008 crash. What CFPB cuts could mean for consumers
One agency of particular benefit to consumers.has been the Consumer Product Safety Commission.(CPSC). The agency has issued rules when there was evidence that consumers would be harmed, even when it stepped on the toes and profits of business interests. Musk hated the National Traffic Safety Agency because it reported the danger posed by Tesla that even resulted in death to the end user of a self-driving car. He took revenge in his DOGE cuts. Officials Are Fired at Traffic Safety Agency Investigating Musk’s Company - The New York Times. Consumer Reports Joins Call to Fully Fund NHTSA in FY26 Appropriations Bill
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-cuts-watchdogs-investigating-self-driving-teslas-2058241#:~:text=Elon%20Musk%20and%20his%20Department,%22autopilot%22%20feature%20and%20others. The Consumer Safety Protection Bureau was established in 1972 in recognition that more than just auto safety scrutiny was needed.
Auto safety regulation was the result of reports of a certain car model causing deaths, the Corvair, and Ralph Nader exposed it in his seminal 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed. (My brother owned one of those and luckily survived a crash that totalled it). That kicked off the publication of a book that resulted in the creation of the United States Department of Transportation in 1966 and the predecessor agencies of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1970 (the recall agency)...and eventually the spread to all consumer products with the formation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission...all sworn to protect consumers and not the business interests of the manufacturers. All could hold hearings, tap experts in the field, and look at consumer reports or lawsuits, issue rules, provide feedback at hearings, and then shape their policies and rules in line with their best professional judgment.
Trump's standard for appointees is, above all, loyal to his wishes. If an agency under his control, independent or not, presents data that makes his political promises look bad, he fires the director, the messenger, who dared to report the data, even when it benefited the companies that favored him. We saw him in action last week when he fired the unfortunate bureaucrat who dared to present figures that showed unemployment was ticking up, when Trump had spent 6 months claiming his tariffs would not cause employment to increase.
Other agencies have already been kneecapped, including those that formerly protected consumers from dirty air and polluted water. The Trump administration announces reorganization and staff cuts at the EPA :per NPR and shuts down the agency's research arm that was producing scientific evidence of global warming. Trump administration shuts down EPA's scientific research arm. https://www.npr.org/people/146944972/rob-stein
What can be done to reverse this attack on consumer protection? Not much for now. It is in the hands of the media to report the connection between consumer problems and the failure of the Trump administration to faithfully execute the laws of the land. Aware of that, voters can elect someone who will restore the intent, purpose, and ability to effectively protect consumers. That "someone" includes members of Congress who have gone along with the Trump anti-consumer agenda. So far as the Supreme Court is concerned, appointments and elections have very long-term consequences and depend upon Senate confirmation of replacements. If a more favorable to consumer Congress happens, any laws will have to be cleverly crafted to stand up to even their right-wing 6-0 dominated Supreme Court scrutiny but at least the oversight committees can do their job to expose and hold the executive branch accountable for failure to execute their laws, and they can refund agencies that have lost their ability to function.
A personal note: When I was a consumer advocacy agency head in Denver in the 1970s, we showed that fiberglass insulation could cause cancer if the fibers were inhaled. We presented this finding to the CPSC, which required a warning label for consumers self-installing the material to wear facemasks. The CPSC required warning labels on packaging material that could suffocate kids, or that, if ingested, would choke babies. Either the product was required to have material warning labels or was removed from retail shelves, regardless if the manufacturer was a friend or contributor to the President. When I left the agency, I wrote a book that was published (now out of print but still available at the Library of Congress, Colorado Consumer Handbook, 1982, Johnson Publishing) on the subject of how these new protection agencies could help consumers resolve issues. That book deserves a severe revision now.
