Yesterday, President Donald Trump issued another seemingly technocratic executive order regarding the structure of our government. This one purportedly asserts presidential control over so-called independent regulatory agencies — or administrative offices that Congress has intentionally designed to be insulated against direct day-to-day control from the president.
In practice, this means the president will have the final word over these agencies’ regulatory decision-making, their interpretations of law, and even how (and whether) they spend the money that Congress has given them. Significantly, much of this authority is to be exercised on the president’s behalf by the Director of the Office of Management Budget (OMB), a position that is currently held by Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect and an unapologetic champion of authoritarianism.
For most Americans, this order will seem like arcane bureaucratic shuffling. And, no doubt, that is part of the point.
But, hidden behind this executive order, and several others before it, is a sinister project: a project to build an imperial presidency. With this brick, Trump is seeking to lay claim to exclusive authority over how executive branch agencies operate. With another brick — the previously announced federal funding freeze — the administration sought to reserve for itself exclusive control over funding decisions for agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.
And with still another brick — the installation of Elon Musk as the head of DOGE — the administration has claimed unreviewable authority over size and scope of executive branch agencies, including whether the agencies even get to exist at all.
As the edifice of this imperial presidency is going up before our eyes, the constitutional role assigned to Congress will simultaneously be dismantled, as the two are inextricably intertwined.
The theory of our constitutional design is that individual freedom is best protected when the constituent powers of government are spread among competing offices. The concentration of power within the Trump White House we are now witnessing is a gross afront to that design. I fear that the reckless abandonment of that design will translate into very real harm for all of us as we try to get through our daily lives.
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James Goodwin | February 19, 2025
On February 18, President Donald Trump issued another seemingly technocratic executive order regarding the structure of our government. This one purportedly asserts presidential control over so-called independent regulatory agencies — or administrative offices that Congress has intentionally designed to be insulated against direct day-to-day control from the president.
Alice Kaswan | February 19, 2025
President Donald Trump seeks to halt Congress’ support for tax credits, grants, and loans that are supporting a transition to clean transportation, a transition necessary to achieving public health standards and reducing the transportation sector’s substantial contribution to increasingly catastrophic climate change. It will be up to Congress to stand up to the president’s pressure and preserve its support for critical environmental and economic investments.
Alice Kaswan | February 18, 2025
As described in Part I, President Trump’s attack on clean vehicles, introduced in his executive order on “Unleashing American Energy,” will undermine progress in achieving healthy air and reducing climate emissions. The executive order requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to consider regulatory changes to vehicle emission standards that would eliminate what he calls the “EV mandate.”
Alice Kaswan | February 17, 2025
President Donald Trump’s attack on electric vehicles threatens not only the nation’s progress in fighting climate change, but torpedoes our ability to achieve healthy air. The Inauguration Day executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” calls for eliminating the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” and “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government distortions that favor EVs ….” Slowing our transition to clean vehicles will have the worst consequences for vulnerable frontline communities living near highways, ports, and warehouses, communities that already experience a disproportionate share of environmental harms.
Bryan Dunning, Joseph Tomain | February 7, 2025
On January 20 — otherwise known as Day One of Trump 2.0 — the president signed a barrage of executive orders, including one declaring a national energy emergency. While it is unsurprising that his policy priorities will reflect his long-standing antipathy toward climate protections and renewables — not to mention the fossil fuel industry’s financial support during his campaign — his attempt to frame this policy by declaring a “national energy emergency” is beyond disingenuous. We have faced real threats to energy security in the past and have weathered them through democratic processes, not by executive fiat, and this isn’t one.
James Goodwin | February 7, 2025
On February 6, the U.S. Senate confirmed Russell Vought as the next director of the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has been at the epicenter of the Trump administration’s push to remake the federal government in an authoritarian image.
James Goodwin | February 5, 2025
Over the course of two posts, I have explored in detail my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order last Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. Remarkably, the order is still not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I offer my final set of observations on what the order is likely to mean during the second Trump administration.
James Goodwin | February 4, 2025
In my previous post, I began exploring some of my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. At this point, the order is not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I will offer some additional observations and analysis.
Center for Progressive Reform | February 3, 2025
The second Trump administration’s disastrous early-term actions do nothing to address the economic inequality that our political classes have long ignored. In its first two weeks, the administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, reversed federal initiatives on environmental justice, withheld public health information, frozen spending on environmental and climate mitigation programs, threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, and just recently threatened to fire more than 1,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers who focus on climate and environmental enforcement.