What the court actually did
On 29 June 2026 the US Supreme Court decided Trump v. Slaughter and held that the Federal Trade Commission's independence from presidential control is unconstitutional. The reasoning follows the unitary executive theory, which places every executive body under direct presidential authority.
The FTC still exists and still enforces. What changed is its legal character. An agency the European Union treated as an independent watchdog is now, in the eyes of the highest US court, an arm of the executive.
Why this reaches your data
The EU-US Data Privacy Framework is the arrangement that lets companies move personal data to the United States without extra legal paperwork. That framework rests on the promise of independent oversight, and it names the FTC's independence 259 times.
Take away the independence and you take away the promise. The European privacy group noyb has already written to the European Commission asking it to wind the deal down in an orderly way, and it plans to file a case that would let the Court of Justice annul the framework outright.
What owners should do before the ruling forces it
Nothing breaks today. The framework stays formally in force until the Commission repeals it or the Court of Justice strikes it down, and that court process usually takes two to three years. The mistake is to read that gap as calm rather than as a countdown.
The work is unglamorous. Map which systems send personal data to US cloud and SaaS providers, check whether standard contractual clauses can carry that traffic if the framework falls, and write the transfer question into every new vendor contract. Owners who prepare the fallback now will not be redrawing their entire data estate under a deadline later.
Read next: Your Attack Surface Is Now the Target · Your AI Now Speaks for You in Law