The people have spoken.
At heart, that is what Donald Trump is arguing: He was elected president (again) last November, and therefore the American people have given him carte blanche to act as he sees fit.
But the reality may be more than the United States bargained for. President Trump has been moving with lightning speed to carry out his agenda – signing a blizzard of executive orders and empowering Elon Musk’s task force, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to remake the federal bureaucracy, as it dismantles agencies and pushes out civil servants.
Why We Wrote This
America’s founders, wanting to prevent political factions, gave equal power to Congress, the courts, and the executive branch. President Donald Trump’s actions are stressing that delicate balance.
In the process, President Trump is essentially doing an end run around Congress, which holds the “power of the purse.” But rather than trying to stop him, Republican lawmakers – who control both houses of Congress – are mostly urging him to keep going.
Mr. Trump is also rhetorically challenging the authority of the judicial branch. He has attacked judges as “liberal activists” and suggested that anything he does to “save” the country cannot be illegal – though he has also stated that he would abide by court rulings.
To Democrats and many scholars, the situation has all the markings of a constitutional crisis: The president is upending the United States’ centuries-old balance of power as laid out by the Founding Fathers. Instead of three co-equal branches acting as a check on each other, power has become increasingly concentrated over the years in the White House – a trend that is now being supercharged under Mr. Trump in ways that, to critics, raise the specter of authoritarianism.
“The executive branch is expanding its powers beyond what any other administration has tried to do,” says Shana Kushner Gadarian, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University. “That’s the crisis we’re in.”
To justify their actions, Mr. Trump and his supporters argue it’s the status quo that has broken to the point of being undemocratic. The federal bureaucracy had grown so large and Congress so gridlocked, they say, that it had become impossible for the government to do what the voters want.
“It does not match the will of the people,” Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, said during a recent informal press conference with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last week. Voters, though, gave Mr. Trump a relatively narrow victory, with slightly less than half of the more than 155 million votes cast.
The bureaucracy, the tech executive said, had become an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government – which has, in a lot of ways, currently, more power than any elected representative.”
In just one month, Mr. Trump – aided by Mr. Musk and his DOGE team – has dramatically cut foreign aid by almost entirely eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, begun dismantling the Department of Education, and raised alarm bells over the safety of taxpayer information at the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service as DOGE aides look for evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
Political polarization leaves fewer voices in political center
Most Republicans in Congress are complying as Mr. Trump usurps the power of the national legislature, as laid out in Article 1 of the Constitution. But some are quietly pushing back, particularly those in battleground districts who at times espouse centrist positions.
Take GOP Rep. Don Bacon, who represents such a district in Nebraska. Though he supports the elimination of the watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he says it must be done correctly.
“We have got to follow the law,” Representative Bacon told CNN. “If there are things we have to redirect, let’s do it the constitutional way.”
Still, voices like Mr. Bacon’s are few and far between; the vast majority of Republicans in Congress occupy safe GOP seats. If they face a threat, it’s a primary challenge from the right if they are perceived as anti-Trump. And they know that the vast resources available to the Republican Party – including Mr. Musk’s billions – could potentially support such a challenger.
Compounding the issue is the fact that Republican control of both houses of Congress is exceedingly narrow, with members on both sides unwilling in most cases to break party ranks. This makes Mr. Trump inherently weak in his ability to pass the more controversial elements of his agenda through Congress. So he is focusing on executive actions – even though several have been challenged in court and could prove to be illegal.
Partisan polarization, growing for decades, hinders Congress’ ability to claw back its own power. “Never Trump” Republicans, including outspoken former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are now in the political wilderness. And the center has hollowed out, a reflection of the gerrymandering that has made most congressional districts safe for one or the other major party.
This scenario demonstrates why the Founding Fathers didn’t mention political parties in the Constitution. They were concerned about factions. But human nature suggests that factions were inevitable, and the founders knew that, says Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“They hoped that they had figured out what [James] Madison called ‘the extent and proper structure’ of our country,” Dr. Perry says. “The structures were all these checks and balances.”
But what they weren’t counting on was lockstep partisanship, which translates today into a pro-Trump, pro-MAGA congressional majority that is likely to reinforce the president’s agenda, at least until the 2026 midterm elections. But even some Republicans are distressed enough by the administration withholding congressionally approved funding that they are asking President Trump to release money meant for farmers and infrastructure projects, among other things.
Efforts to rein in the executive branch come and go
Congress ceding power to the president, and the president aggressively taking it, is not just a Republican phenomenon. It’s been happening for decades. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who took office amid the Great Depression, signed hundreds of executive orders in his first year and, unlike President Trump so far, got Congress to pass major pieces of legislation that massively expanded the federal government.
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Republican President George W. Bush created the current-day homeland security structure, and aggressively used “signing statements” when he signed bills into law. Such statements, though not legally binding, provided interpretations of the law that pushed the envelope of executive power.
When President Barack Obama’s Democrats lost control of Congress in his first midterm elections, he used what he called a “pen and phone” strategy to enact his agenda: the signing of executive actions and phone calls to outside groups to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation.
More recently, President Joe Biden signed more than 40 executive orders in his first 100 days, a record for the post-FDR era. Many of those orders were efforts to undo what his predecessor, Mr. Trump, had done – creating a pingpong effect as administrations change hands and parties. Mr. Trump has now undone many of Mr. Biden’s orders, signing more than 60 of his own so far.
Efforts to reform or rein in the executive branch have waxed and waned over the years.
President Ronald Reagan set up the Grace Commission, chaired by businessman J. Peter Grace, to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. While most of its recommendations were never implemented, the commission is credited with conceptualizing future efforts to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
Perhaps the most successful government restructuring was launched in 1993 by Vice President Al Gore. In its five years, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government eliminated more than 100 programs and 250,000 federal jobs, and consolidated more than 800 agencies. But unlike Mr. Trump’s effort, the Gore initiative involved careful review of programs and expenditures before action was taken.
By all appearances, President Biden lacked interest in government reform. During his first two years in office, he launched only two reform initiatives, compared with 37 during President Bill Clinton’s two terms and 31 during the Reagan presidency. As a result, President Biden may have helped pave the way for the current Trump-Musk effort. Public trust in democracy has been in near-steady decline since the 1980s. A recent uptick in Gallup polling, after the November election and before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, reflects higher satisfaction among Republicans.
Trump, Musk actions set up challenges for U.S. governance
Mr. Musk has latched on to public unhappiness with government and turned it into a crusade. The DOGE team has been going into the data systems of various government agencies targeted for downsizing or outright elimination, alarming public-interest watchdogs.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised Mr. Musk’s efforts, and made him a “special government employee” amid concerns that the multibillionaire was operating without any legal guidelines or oversight. One looming question centers on Mr. Musk’s many corporate interests that have business with the federal government, and whether he is benefiting from DOGE’s actions. When asked, he denies any conflict of interest.
For American governance writ large, the biggest test is yet to come. Legal challenges to many of Mr. Trump’s actions are in court, and a key question is, What happens if the Supreme Court rules against him? Does he comply?
Or will Mr. Trump follow the example of an earlier disrupter in chief, President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait hangs in the Oval Office? In 1832, President Jackson famously ignored a Supreme Court ruling on Native American rights, and challenged the high court to enforce its decision. It could not.
For now, Dr. Perry says, “We are still seeing checks in the district courts.”
But soon, Mr. Trump could find himself in the same position as Jackson almost 200 years ago, facing a court order he has no intention of following.
