A few years ago, we published an article in the Harvard Law Review describing how a determined president could profoundly undermine the core competence of the federal government, weakening the capacity of federal agencies to perform their congressionally assigned functions. We identified several tactics a president might use, including budgetary and personnel moves, to undermine and disable agencies, and argued that the constitutional and legal constraints on such actions were likely to be largely ineffective. Our article was inspired by observations of President Donald Trump’s first term, and by other presidential administrations that adopted some of the same strategies to greater or lesser extents. Our point was nonpartisan: Any president could do these things. We argued that a campaign of structural deregulation should be seen as both an encroachment on Congress’s lawmaking authority and a dereliction of the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws.
We thought we were being grim in our imaginings of what a motivated chief executive might do. But as it turns out, we were not pessimistic enough. In its first few weeks, the second Trump administration has launched a campaign of structural deregulation more sweeping in scale and scope than what we anticipated, and far beyond what the president tried to do in his first term.