A removal-power case with a data-flows problem
On June 29, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter that Congress cannot shield Federal Trade Commission members from at-will presidential removal, overturning the Court's 91-year-old precedent in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion held that officials exercising executive power "must be removable by the President at will," ending the FTC's formal independence as a matter of US constitutional law (SCOTUSblog).
That is a domestic separation-of-powers ruling. It is also, unexpectedly, a Swiss trade-and-privacy problem.
Why a US removal case reaches Bern
On August 14, 2024, the Swiss Federal Council recognized the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework as providing adequate protection for personal data sent to certified US companies, adding the United States to Switzerland's adequacy list effective September 15, 2024 (FDPIC). That finding — deliberately built as a mirror of the EU-US Data Privacy Framework the European Commission adopted in 2023 — rests on the FTC acting as an "independent supervisory authority" that enforces the commercial promises US companies make when they certify. Take away the FTC's statutory independence, and the specific plank Swiss and EU regulators relied on to call US enforcement adequate no longer describes US law.
The complaint organization noyb, in a June 29, 2026 letter to the European Commission, counted 259 separate references to FTC independence across the Commission's 2023 adequacy decision and called the legal foundation "collapsed," demanding an orderly withdrawal (noyb). On July 31, 2026, the European Data Protection Board sent its own letter to Commissioner Michael McGrath asking Brussels to "closely assess" whether the ruling affects the EU-US Data Privacy Framework's validity — a formal, institutional request for review, not just advocacy noise (IAPP).
Switzerland's regulator, the FDPIC, has said nothing publicly on the ruling as of this writing, even though the Swiss-US Framework shares the identical enforcement architecture the EDPB is now scrutinizing. That silence is itself notable: Switzerland's adequacy finding has historically tracked the EU's, but Bern has no seat at the Commission's review and no equivalent institutional trigger of its own to force one.
The steelman — and where it overreaches
The case for treating this as a genuine adequacy problem is real, not manufactured. Adequacy findings are supposed to test whether a third country provides protection "essentially equivalent" to the assessing jurisdiction's own — and an independent enforcement authority insulated from political interference is a defensible, non-trivial component of that test. If the FTC's five commissioners can be fired whenever their enforcement priorities diverge from the White House's, the premise that DPF complaints will be adjudicated on the merits rather than on political convenience is weaker than it was in 2023, when both the EU and Swiss decisions were written.
But the ruling should not be read as broader than it is. It reaches the FTC's commercial enforcement role — the arm that investigates certified companies for violating DPF principles. It does not touch the separate redress track Swiss individuals actually use for signals-intelligence complaints: the Data Protection Review Court and CLPO process created under Executive Order 14086, to which the US Attorney General designated Switzerland a "qualifying state" on June 7, 2024, giving Swiss residents standing to file complaints about US intelligence access to their data (FDPIC complaint form). That mechanism sits inside the Justice Department and intelligence community, structurally distinct from the FTC, and it was the piece the EU's General Court scrutinized and upheld on September 3, 2025 in Latombe v. Commission — finding the DPRC "sufficiently independent" under the EU Charter, before Trump v. Slaughter existed. Philippe Latombe's appeal is now pending before the Court of Justice as Case C-703/25 P, with no hearing date yet set, and it will likely be the vehicle that actually tests how much Slaughter changes the analysis.
The proportionate path for Bern
The honest position is that Trump v. Slaughter degrades one input into the adequacy calculus without yet producing any evidence of politicized non-enforcement against a certified company. Suspending the Swiss-US Framework pre-emptively — before the Commission's own review concludes, before the CJEU rules on Latombe's appeal, and before any actual enforcement failure — would impose real costs on Swiss firms and the thousands of certified US counterparties they rely on, for a harm that remains theoretical. Abrupt suspension is also the kind of move that is hard to reverse credibly: once a data flow gets treated as legally unsafe, businesses build around that assumption long after the underlying legal question resolves.
The better course is calibrated monitoring, not unilateral withdrawal: track the Commission's review, track Latombe's CJEU appeal, and reserve suspension for evidence that FTC enforcement has actually become selective. Switzerland should also use its bilateral channel with Washington to seek an explicit, durable commitment — ideally a binding assurance beyond the reach of a single administration — that DPF enforcement will continue to operate independent of political direction. A framework that took two years to negotiate and eighteen months to bed in deserves a response calibrated to the actual change in risk, not to the size of the headline.