On a morning that lawyers in Washington will be dissecting for years, the United States Supreme Court swept away most of the legal barriers that had, for decades, insulated federal regulatory agencies from direct presidential control. Those barriers — built up through acts of Congress and layers of court precedent — had allowed bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to operate with a degree of independence from whoever occupied the White House. That independence, their defenders argued, was precisely what allowed them to regulate impartially. The decision strikes at the architecture of what scholars call the "administrative state": the sprawling network of agencies that governs everything from clean-air standards to Wall Street trading rules.

Since the New Deal era of the 1930s, Congress deliberately designed many of these bodies to sit at arm's length from political pressure. Commissioners could not simply be dismissed by a president who disliked their rulings. Yesterday's ruling changes that calculus fundamentally, giving the executive branch a degree of authority over these agencies that it has not held in living memory. The consequences are likely to ripple far beyond Washington.

Regulatory decisions affecting pharmaceutical approvals, environmental limits and financial oversight are now more susceptible to political interference — a prospect that alarms consumer advocates and environmental groups in equal measure.