Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-86_l5gm.pdf
Page Number: 16

Cite as:  598 U. S. ____ (2023) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

Board’s “freedom from Presidential oversight” rendered un-
constitutional  “all  power  and  authority  [the  Board]  exer-
cised.”   561  U. S.,  at  508  (internal  quotation marks  omit-
ted).  Only the Court’s ability to sever the relevant statute’s 
for-cause removal provision enabled the Board to keep run-
ning.   See  ibid.  The  Article  II  challenges  in  Axon’s  and 
Cochran’s  cases  would  likewise  prevent  ALJs—through 
whom the Commissions do much of their work—from exer-
cising  any  power,  unless  they  lose  their  double-for-cause 
tenure  protection.    And  Axon’s  combination-of-functions 
claim similarly goes to the core of the FTC’s existence, given 
that the agency indeed houses (and by design) both prose-
cutorial and adjudicative activities.  The challenges here, as 
in Free Enterprise Fund, are not to any specific substantive 
decision—say, to fining a company (Thunder Basin) or fir-
ing an employee (Elgin).  Nor are they to the commonplace 
procedures agencies use to make such a decision.  They are 
instead challenges, again as in Free Enterprise Fund, to the 
structure or very existence of an agency: They charge that 
an agency is wielding authority unconstitutionally in all or 
a broad swath of its work.  Given that equivalence, it would 
be surprising to treat the claims here differently from the 
one  in  Free  Enterprise  Fund—which  we  held  belonged  in 
district court. 

And when we apply the Thunder Basin factors, we indeed 
come out in the same place as Free Enterprise Fund.  Our 
reasoning differs in some particulars, reflecting variations 
between  that  case  and  the  two  here.  But  the  30,000-foot 
view of the issue before us ends up a good proxy for the more 
granular one.  Each of the three Thunder Basin factors sig-
nals  that  a  district  court  has  jurisdiction  to  adjudicate 
Axon’s and Cochran’s (like the accounting firm’s) sweeping 
constitutional claims. 

We begin with the factor whose application here is least 
straightforward: whether preclusion of district court juris-
diction  “could  foreclose  all  meaningful  judicial  review.”