In March, Alvaro Bedoya stepped onto a stage before a crowd of 30,000 people in Denver, Colorado, and introduced himself as a sitting member of the Federal Trade Commission.
That bland-sounding title was actually a provocation. He had been fired by President Donald Trump 72 hours earlier.
Bedoya railed against his firing before the crowd, framing it as the “rule of law versus the rule of billionaires.” He accused Trump of trying to turn the FTC from a “fierce corporate watchdog” into “little lapdogs for his golfing buddies.”
That speech marked the beginning of what has become a national political and legal campaign by Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter — an FTC commissioner Trump fired the same day — to turn their dismissals into an attack on what Trump is doing to official Washington.
Since taking office, Trump has axed more than a dozen leaders of independent federal agencies, including labor, product safety and privacy oversight boards. The purge of Democratic commissioners amounts to an unprecedented effort to seize control of the federal government’s watchdogs. Bedoya and Slaughter have embraced a new role as the faces of the resistance, trying to leverage the shock-and-awe quality of Trump’s own moves against him.
“I definitely wouldn’t have been on that stage had the president not fired me,” Bedoya told POLITICO. “I didn’t want to get fired … I wish I hadn’t had the chance.”
On July 17, Bedoya and Slaughter won a round of the fight: A federal judge ruled that Trump’s move was illegal, reinstating Slaughter to her post. Bedoya was no longer eligible, having resigned in June to return to the private sector.
Both intend to keep their campaign running, in part because the Trump administration hasn’t given up the effort to shut them down. The White House plans to appeal Thursday’s decision, trying to get Slaughter dismissed for good, and establish the president’s right to fire agency commissioners at will. That fight could go as far as the Supreme Court.
As the nation’s top corporate regulator, enforcing consumer protections and antitrust policy, the FTC has been a lightning rod under both Trump and former President Joe Biden. Both Bedoya and Slaughter said they expected to be fired early in Trump’s term — though he targeted other agencies first, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
The two say they hope to use their firings to make a public case for the independence of agencies like the FTC.
“There are two lines of pushback: One is legal, and the other is political. And I want to win both of those arguments,” Slaughter said. “The legal fight we’re having in the court. But the political fight is in the court of public opinion.”
Out of office, into the spotlight
Once they were fired on March 18, Bedoya and Slaughter were no longer allowed into the FTC building, and lost access to their official emails and staff. But they have continued to speak under the title of FTC commissioner at rallies and meetings, and have continued to publish dissenting opinions to Chair Andrew Ferguson’s actions, as active commissioners would.
They got immediate support from members of Congress: On March 26, when congressional Republicans held a hearing about online dangers to children, Democratic committee members invited Slaughter as a witness and turned the hearing into a public referendum on how the firings would weaken the agency.
Normally, agencies like the FTC get largely hands-off treatment from the president, who appoints a chair to control the agenda and fills vacancies but leaves other sitting commissioners in place, including those appointed by the other party. This creates continuity and expertise, and also ensures federal enforcement doesn’t shift radically with the whims of each president.
Trump’s firings threaten that independence, and may also be steering the government into a legal battle that could redefine the roles of commissioners at agencies — and shift long-held norms on whether they exist to serve the public or the president.
In an emailed statement to POLITICO, the White House defended the move. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the President’s constitutional authority to fire and remove executive officers who exercise his authority,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai wrote.
The Supreme Court decided in May to allow Trump to fire labor regulators, a signal that it would side with Trump against Bedoya and Slaughter’s challenge. The ability to fire FTC commissioners at will would change the watchdog agency forever, experts said. (The commission is supposed to have five members; its website currently shows just the three Republicans.)
“There’s no question that their defeat will kill the Federal Trade Commission as we know it,” Stephen Calkins, a former FTC general counsel who teaches law at Wayne State University, said. “I don’t see how an agency really can be functioning as an independent agency if the president can fire any commissioner at the drop of a hat.”
For Bedoya, a former Hill staffer and law professor with expertise in data privacy who had been appointed by Biden in 2021, the firing took away his dream job. He received the White House’s termination notice over email while at his daughter’s gymnastics class, and was so distracted by the volume of media requests flooding his phone that he got lost driving home.
The notoriety has brought unwelcome attention. The night they were fired, both Bedoya and Slaughter received unsolicited pizza deliveries to their houses — which they saw as likely “pizza doxxings,” part of a campaign of veiled threats that has also hit multiple judges who ruled against the president.
But it also gave him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with a national platform to fight actions he considered “blatantly illegal” — and to advise other commissioners fired by Trump.
Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, was fired in May, and says he has closely followed Bedoya and Slaughter’s playbook, suing to challenge his firing, refusing to cede his title and pushing back on social media.
“I watched [Bedoya and Slaughter] do that very effectively, and we’ve tried to do the same thing,” said Trumka Jr., who was reinstated in June.
Jocelyn Samuels, a Democratic commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was fired by Trump in February and was one of the first to publicly challenge the termination in the media. The morning after she was fired, Bedoya — who was still in his seat at the FTC — showed up at her doorstep and encouraged her to view the termination as a platform.
“His constant counsel to me was, ‘Do not think about this as a setback,’“ Samuels said. “‘Think about it as an opportunity.’”
The chief executive vs. the executive branch
Bedoya’s critics argue that the president has the right to fire employees within the executive branch. Josh Wright, a former Republican FTC commissioner during the Obama administration, was one of the first people to respond to Bedoya’s firings.
He acknowledged that the firings and the pushback have given Bedoya and Slaughter a more prominent platform to make their case — but said their public campaign won’t hold much weight in court.
“The audience is the Supreme Court, not the court of public opinion. I don’t think that it is an effective strategy with the Supreme Court,” Wright said.
In a sense, Bedoya and Slaughter’s campaigns began even before they were fired. Within the first few weeks after new FTC Chair Ferguson took office in January, Bedoya would openly challenge the agency’s new leader. He responded to Ferguson’s agency-wide memos against DEI initiatives and the transgender community with dissenting “reply-all” emails to the FTC’s staff.
At the same time, Slaughter worked offline, meeting directly with rank-and-file staffers who had concerns about those memos, and relaying their feedback to Ferguson.
What started as internal pushback would spill out into the public, with Bedoya asking Ferguson on social media why he hadn’t investigated rising egg prices in February.
Much of that is par for the course for minority commissioners, who have little power but use their slots to air out their views. Ferguson’s responses, however, escalated them into public arguments.
“It’s one thing for a commissioner to be angry, that’s just a commissioner being angry, but the chairman answering him at length and getting a sum total of 2+ million views on it, that’s conflict, and conflict is a story,” Bedoya said.
This established a working dynamic that has continued since the firings: Bedoya would lead on the public front, while Slaughter worked behind the scenes to build alliances and maintain relationships.
Moving the fight to social media
The day that Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners, Bedoya set up a makeshift studio in his wife’s closet office, and filmed a 57-second video that night calling the termination illegal and harmful to the American public.
He’s since amassed about 250,000 views from videos he’s posted on social media challenging the firings, making slight improvements like learning how to automatically caption his clips.
Since March, Bedoya has picked his fights through public appearances and on social media, protesting both the firings and the policy moves of FTC chair Ferguson, such as postponing the deadline for a rule that would have made it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions online.
“When I was a regular commissioner, I might put out a statement and say, ‘that was a really good statement.’ 95% of the people who read that statement are lawyers for Fortune 100 companies,” he said. “If I take one minute of that day and cut a 60-second video and put it online, 25,000 people might see it, who don’t even know what the hell the FTC is.”
Bedoya doesn’t consider himself part of any formal resistance movements, saying that his motivation is defending the FTC’s ability to protect consumers as an independent agency.
In Colorado, he was a guest at an overtly political rally — hosted by Democratic powerhouses Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. In June, he flew to Iowa and addressed farmers about monopolistic practices. But he said he’s not using his platform to launch himself into public office.
“There’s nothing that will cure you of the desire to do something like that than spending a year in a Senate confirmation process,” Bedoya said.
After resigning from the FTC in June, Bedoya started as a senior adviser at the American Economic Liberties Project, focusing on ways to fight for workers and small businesses through public interest litigation.
Slaughter said the roughly four months of unemployment had been difficult, but she would continue to fight to uphold the responsibilities of the commissioner’s role.
“There are a lot of ways in which, for my family and for myself, it’d be a lot easier to say, ‘forget this, I’m going to move onto something else,’ which is what the administration wants,” she said.
