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.
