Ever since Donald Trump was sworn in as president, it’s felt as though every day has brought a fresh assertion of presidential power—often at Congress’s expense. It began on the first day with a couple dozen executive orders, and has continued apace with declarations affecting the federal bureaucracy, inspectors general, crucial public health communications, federal grants and loans, and more.
There will be plenty of time in coming months to get into the specifics of how the Trump administration is trying to reshape the federal government in its preferred image. But today, I want to look at those unilateral executive orders—and the President’s bid to freeze grants and loans that don’t align with his policies—and why they’re a test that Congress needs not to fail.
The first thing to remember is that it’s hardly novel for a president to grab for power. Every president in living memory has tried to do so, and often for understandable reasons. The modern world demands quick, decisive action. Americans like presidents who act forcefully. And Congress is complex, convoluted, and hard to work with; it is far easier for an administration to act on its own. In recent decades, even members of Congress have deferred to the president, giving him room to address issues they don’t want to tackle or can’t agree upon.
Presidents have wielded executive orders to great effect. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, FDR’s Works Progress Administration, John Kennedy’s Peace Corps, affirmative action under Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon – all came about through executive orders. There’s no question this would be a different country without them.
Yet in a real way, many executive orders are a sign of weakness, not of strength. They’re a bid to make an end-run around Congress, because the administration knows that up on Capitol Hill, it might encounter insurmountable opposition to its goals.
But Capitol Hill is exactly where controversial policies need to be vetted. We have been a democracy and a great nation because of the long history of consultation, interaction, and mutual respect between the two branches. Americans after the Revolutionary War explicitly did not want to create a king as the head of state. That is why the Constitution circumscribes the President’s powers and gives key authority to the courts and to Congress—the branch that actually represents Americans in all their regional, political, ideological, and personal diversity. Plain and simple, we get a voice in government because of Congress, not because of the President.
This is why, in the end, there is no substitute for legislation. In our system, presidents cannot write a budget or reform entitlements by themselves. Because executive orders lack the permanence and force of law, they can be hard to implement and can be reversed by a later president. They are more subject to legal challenge than legislation. And most important, executive orders do not benefit from a process of consensus-building and a range of perspectives independent of the President’s.
With his executive orders and especially with his declaration that he has the power to freeze federal grants and loans—money that was explicitly appropriated by Congress—President Trump is trying to upend all that. As one Democratic senator said recently, the move “undermines the entire architecture of the Constitution. It essentially makes the president into a king.”
The courts will weigh in on the legalities of that and other moves. I’m more concerned with how Congress reacts. Because in key ways, it’s not just a branch of government: It’s the cornerstone of how a free people govern themselves. Sure, it can be frustrating to need to find compromises and to strive for consensus. But without them, we become a harsher country, where the strong prey on those without power. Congress has its issues and problems, but in the end it’s where you and I should be able to go with an expectation that we’ll be treated with equal respect. If Congress doesn’t stand up for itself, it’s failing us as well.