WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump fired the two Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, leaving only two members of a five-person agency that is traditionally independent of the White House.

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya disclosed the firings, and both called the move “illegal.” The agency has been tasked for over a century with promoting competition and protecting consumers from unfair business practices.

“Why? Because I have a voice. And he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people,” Slaughter said in a statement, referring to Trump. “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.”

Slaughter, a former chief counsel to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., has been at the FTC since May 2018. She said the administration “clearly fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide.” She noted that she was at the agency during the first Trump administration.

Bedoya, who joined the FTC in May 2022, criticized Trump and called for the public to “fight back.”

“Now, the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies,” Bedoya said on the social platform X. “Who will Trump’s FTC work for? Will it work for the billionaires? Or will it work for you?”

Bedoya added that the staff at the FTC is “unafraid of the Martin Shkreli and Jeff Bezos of the world.”

In a case brought by the FTC, Shkreli was found liable in 2022 for $64.6 million for anticompetitive practices for monopolizing access to the life-saving drug Daraprim used to treat the parasitic infection toxoplasmosis. Shkreli was a founder of Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC.

Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com Inc. and is now the executive chairman. He also owns The Washington Post and has made changes to the paper’s editorial page, including by deciding just before the November vote that the paper would no longer endorse a candidate in presidential elections.

Bedoya was the first chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Vice President Kamala Harris broke a 50-50 Senate tie to confirm him. Republicans had objected to some of Bedoya’s Twitter activity, including a tweet describing the 2016 Republican National Convention as a “white supremacist rally.”

The departure of Slaughter and Bedoya leaves the FTC with only two members. The Senate Commerce Committee voted, 20-8, last week to advance the nomination of Mark Meador to the agency. Meador is a partner at Kressin Meador Powers LLC.

Ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., voted against the nominee.

“When I and several colleagues asked whether he would refuse to carry out illegal orders from the president, Mr. Meador hedged,” she said. “The answer from any nominee should simply be ‘No,’ but he hedged. ... We need somebody who believes that they’re not just a rubber stamp for the president, but have responsibilities and duties to carry out.”

Cantwell said on X in response to the firings that the FTC should be an “independent, bipartisan consumer watchdog that puts consumers ahead of politics.”

“You can’t just fire commissioners because you don’t like them, you can only fire them for cause,” she said.

The FTC and the Justice Department typically share oversight of antitrust issues, dividing cases according to expertise within the two entities.

The firings appear to break precedent set by a 1935 Supreme Court case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that found it unconstitutional to fire a FTC member for policy positions. The president can only remove an FTC official for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

Slaughter said “today the President illegally fired me from my position as a Federal Trade Commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent.”

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