Opinion of the Court
Board’s “freedom from Presidential oversight” rendered unconstitutional “all power and authority [the Board] exercised.” 561 U. S., at 508 (internal quotation marks omitted). Only the Court’s ability to sever the relevant statute’s for-cause removal provision enabled the Board to keep running. 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 exercising 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 prosecutorial 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 firing 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 signals 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 jurisdiction “could foreclose all meaningful judicial review.”
