Thank you for your reply-- you got me to reread Seila Law v. CFPB and I now agree with you. The fact that the CFPB had a single officer was clearly important to the outcome of the case.
I agree with the outcome of that case, but don't think it goes far enough. Scalia's dissent in Morrison v Olson seems like the best understanding of the Constitution's requirement that "the executive Power shall be vested in a President" and that "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." To Scalia, the President cannot be deprived of control anywhere a "purely executive power" is exercised.
The President; “independent” officers and agencies (to the extent that this is a formal distinction, “independence” is often attributed on a softer political basis to regular executive agencies and officers, too) are those who (or, for agencies, whose group of principals are) legally protected against Presidential removal except for specified cause.
And also Congress, as such officers are civil officers subject to impeachment.
> For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a director who is appointed by the President for a 5 year term, and can only be fired for a narrow list of reasons. The Supreme Court struck down that restriction and said, roughly, that any inquiry into why the President is firing a particular bureaucrat would infringe on the Executive power that is vested in the President alone.
No, it didn't. It struck down the combination of that protection and a single-director government structure, declaring that because Congress had established a single-responsible-officer structure, it could not also (even though the CFPB exercised quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, do which the Court had allowed similar arrangements for multidirector agencies) restrict dismissal of the director to limited cause.
It very much did not find that any legal restriction on why the President is firing a particular bureaucrat “would infringe on the Executive power that is vested in the President alone” (and, in fact, a wide array of bureaucrats in the federal executive enjoy exactly the kind of protection that was not permitted to the head of the CFPB because of the structure of the agency.)
And it even moreso did not find that any inquiry into such a firing (such as the Congress might do before applying after-the-fact, discretionary consequences like impeachment and removal) would violate the Executive Power.