The White House reality sheet stated the objective of this arrangement is to guarantee that the president and chief law officer “interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.”

John Bergmayer, legal director of customer advocacy group Public Knowledge, stated Trump’s order is based upon a “unitary executive” theory that “has made its way from the fringes of academia to the halls of power.”

“In this latest Executive Order, the Trump regime purports to seize for itself the power Congress delegated to independent regulatory agencies, and as written, declares the White House’s interpretation of the law as ‘authoritative,’ with no mention of the courts,” Bergmayer stated. “Of course, the president is not, and never has been, the final arbiter of what is lawful. Lawyers working for the government owe their allegiance to the American people, not to President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s OMB director, Russell Vought, informed Tucker Carlson in a current interview that “there are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Extending Trump’s grip

The president chooses commissioners and selects chairs at firms like the FCC, independent companies are expected to make their own choices. A 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service stated an independent company is “a freestanding executive branch organization that is not part of any department or other agency,” and which has “greater autonomy from the President’s leadership and insulation from partisan politics than is typical of executive branch agencies.”

Other independent firms consist of the National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the report stated. Laws authorized by Congress define the authority of independent firms in addition to the firms’ “goals, principles, missions, and mandates,” the report stated.