Privacy in Peril: When Unchecked Surveillance Power and Unbalanced Presidential Power Collide
The author writes this Essay as someone who has spent most of the last decade as a Federal Trade Commissioner, developing a deep understanding of the threats posed by the unchecked accumulation of personal data in the hands of a small number of dominant corporations. She writes it also as the named plaintiff in Trump v. Slaughter, a Supreme Court case decided in June 2026 in which the Court determined that the President of the United States may fire members of independent federal agencies at will, notwithstanding ninety years of constitutional precedent and over a century of clear statutory language that said he may not. She sits at the convergence of different areas of substantive law— privacy and competition on the one hand, administrative and constitutional law on the other—which has given her a unique perspective on their interaction.
The continued unfettered commercial agglomeration of data, especially in the hands of concentrated corporate giants, and the simultaneous expansion of presidential power—including over agencies Congress designed to have a degree of independence—are mutually reinforcing crises that together create a threat to personal privacy qualitatively different from, and far more dangerous than, either poses alone. When massive troves of data are held by very few corporations, and when the government is willing and increasingly able to strong-arm those corporations, personal privacy is imperiled.
This Essay proceeds in six parts. Section II traces the current state of data concentration: a surveillance economy in which a handful of platforms and brokers hold granular, persistent, and comprehensive information about virtually every person in the country. Section III examines the ways in which the Trump administration has expanded the power of the President over both government institutions and private market actors. Section IV shows how these two developments in combination create an architecture of coercion, in which an unconstrained presidency can leverage corporate data holdings as instruments of political control. Section V explains the extraterritorial consequences of this dynamic: because the data held by American platforms is not bounded by American borders, the deconstruction of American regulatory institutions threatens both the privacy of people worldwide and international data flows. Section VI sketches some of the reforms necessary to address these converging crises.
Recommended Citation: Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Privacy in Peril: When Unchecked Surveillance Power and Unbalanced Presidential Power Collide, 49 Fordham Int'l L.J. 1213 (2026).