Trump's Efforts To Consolidate Executive Branch Power

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Speaker 3 Well, hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Osma Khalid.
I cover the White House.

Speaker 4 I'm Susan Davis. I cover cover politics.

Speaker 5 And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.

Speaker 3 And today on the show, we have some special in-depth reporting from Carrie and Sue about President Trump's efforts to dismantle the executive branch in its current form and make it more accountable directly to him.

Speaker 3 And Sue, I just want to begin by asking you where the idea for this reporting came from.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think it comes as no surprise that Trump has taken dozens of actions since he took office, I think, just seven weeks ago.

Speaker 4 And I think we were trying to find the cohesive string theory here. I think we had covered a lot of the one-off firings or what's happening in an individual department or what is he doing over here.

Speaker 4 And then you realize as you talk to people and talk to people who support what Trump's doing, there's a bigger, grander design of what he's trying to do to the executive branch and how he wants to basically remake the way American government has worked, at least for the better part of the past 50 years.

Speaker 3 So you just mentioned that Trump re-entered the White House just about seven weeks ago, so it hasn't been a whole lot of time.

Speaker 3 I'm curious if you can explain what specific actions you all have looked at. And Carrie, why don't you start?

Speaker 5 Yeah, inside the Justice Department, the ranks of the career civil service are basically being remade before our eyes.

Speaker 5 Remember, on his first day in office, the president pardoned virtually all of the people convicted or charged in connection with the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

Speaker 5 And then prosecutors who moved to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump during the period when he was out of office, and many of the prosecutors who went after defendants in terms of the Capitol siege, they were fired.

Speaker 5 The Justice Department has also gotten rid of the pardon attorney, the person who oversees Freedom of Information Act requests.

Speaker 5 They are dismantling in large part the unit that prosecutes political corruption and corrupt government officials and judges and states all over the country.

Speaker 5 And, you know, there's really been a new focus on immigration and immigration enforcement.

Speaker 5 Some of the most senior prosecutors in the country over the last 20 20 years or more who work on national security and tax issues and political corruption, they've been moved into a unit that's supposed to deal with sanctuary cities.

Speaker 5 So the DOJ is very, very different than it was even a few weeks ago.

Speaker 3 And is the goal of that, Kerry, to dismantle or weaken the DOJ or to make Trump sort of the arbitrator of all power?

Speaker 5 You know, the Supreme Court said in its immunity decision last year involving Donald Trump that the president has a ton of power when it comes to the Justice Department.

Speaker 5 A president can very easily have conversations with any old prosecutor around the country or any old FBI agent across the country about cases, specific cases.

Speaker 5 And for the last 50 years or so, on and off, there have been limits and guardrails on those kinds of conversations between White House officials and line attorneys working on very sensitive cases.

Speaker 5 Those guardrails are basically swept away now.

Speaker 5 And we're now seeing some evidence, according to law professors, that people who are friends of President Trump and are loyal to his immigration agenda are getting breaks at the Justice Department.

Speaker 5 And people who have criticized President Trump and some of his priorities may be getting a closer look from some of the prosecutors Trump has appointed.

Speaker 4 I think the Justice Department stuff is probably the most blockbuster that has caught the attention of the public, especially because it's eroded sort of this the norms and laws post Watergate that tried to create this independence between the White House and the Justice Department.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that started me sort of thinking about this is when Trump came in and over a weekend fired all the independent inspectors general across what is now 18 federal agencies.

Speaker 4 And one thing that I learned in the course of this reporting is the role of inspectors general was actually created by Congress in response to the Watergate scandal.

Speaker 4 It was one of those features of government that was built up in the years since Watergate to create these independent individuals within government that were designed to operate independent of the political whims of the White House, to root out waste fraud, find inefficiencies, swept away.

Speaker 4 And then I think you can start to see this constellation of this type of effort happening at these other independent agencies.

Speaker 4 Trump's tried to defund or attempt to fire people at, for instance, the Security and Exchange Commission, which oversees Wall Street, the Federal Election Commission, which oversees campaign finance and election law.

Speaker 4 The Trump administration has essentially shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is sort of a consumer watchdog.

Speaker 4 These independent agencies of the executive branch that have been by sort of design design expected to be separate or safe from the politicization of the White House.

Speaker 4 And Trump has just taken sort of a hammer to all of that. Obviously, it's going to be tested in the courts, but it's not by accident.
They're trying to do something here.

Speaker 4 They're trying to say to the executive branch, you don't get to operate independent of the President of the United States. You need to be directly accountable to him.

Speaker 3 So it sounds like what you're saying, Sue, is despite sort of the perceived chaos, maybe that some would say it looks chaotic, some of the events that we've seen over the last seven weeks or so, that there is this broader, deliberate strategy.

Speaker 4 Yes, and I think, like, look, the White House, none of this is secret. All of this is kind of being said out loud and in broad daylight.

Speaker 4 On February 18th, the White House issued an executive order essentially articulating the legal strategy for it.

Speaker 4 It says, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch, period.

Speaker 4 And also, when you talk to supporters of what Trump's doing, legal scholars, all of this is sort of founded in the legal theory of what is known as the theory of the unitary executive.

Speaker 4 Marr and I talked about this last year during the campaign.

Speaker 4 It's a legal theory that basically says because the president is the head of the executive branch, all forces of the executive branch need to be directly responsive to the president.

Speaker 4 One of the people I spoke to is John Yoo. He's a conservative legal scholar.
He supports the unitary executive theory and he explained it this way.

Speaker 6 The Constitution puts the executive power of the federal government into one person, the president.

Speaker 6 Now, that can be risky or dangerous, of course, but they thought that was outweighed by the virtues of having a single person who could act quickly, could act with speed, could act with decision and capability.

Speaker 6 So the famous phrase that Hamilton used is,

Speaker 6 good government is defined by energy in the executive. And to have that energy, you need to have the power in one person.

Speaker 4 And I think the argument for this is that it would make the executive branch more directly accountable to the White House and that the president would truly, yes, be more powerful.

Speaker 4 They could command the government at will faster and more importantly, the president can fire or hire whoever he wants.

Speaker 3 Kerry, there are obviously a lot of critics to how Trump has been operating. What are you hearing about some of these actions?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I've been talking to some of the nonprofit groups and independent watchdogs. Danielle Bryan leads the project on government oversight.

Speaker 5 She basically said that if Trump and his advisor, Elon Musk, want to cut waste, fraud, and abuse in the government, The very last thing you would do was fire inspectors, general, because that's their whole point.

Speaker 5 That's what they do. She also said it's not a coincidence that some of these watchdogs got fired early in the administration.

Speaker 7 I don't think it's

Speaker 7 inconsequential that removing the heads of those offices whose job it is to protect whistleblowers and prevent corruption and wrongdoing were the early targets of the Trump administration.

Speaker 7 I think what's also important is the signal that that sends to all those who are left behind.

Speaker 5 In other words, she says, you know, if you're still in one of these agencies and you see waste fraud or abuse or a conflict of interest, are you going to want to raise your hand now that you saw so many of your friends get fired?

Speaker 4 I spoke to another one of these watchdogs, Tara Malloy. She's a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center.

Speaker 4 And she made what I think is a good point using the agency they care about the most, the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission.

Speaker 4 And she said, look, it's just incompatible to say that an agency is going to be a fair and neutral arbiter of the law and also run by one of the candidates on the ballot.

Speaker 7 And I think you can see the basic unfairness if you were to flip the situation.

Speaker 7 If, for instance, the Biden administration had exerted presidential control over the FEC, would President Trump think that his 2024 campaign was getting a fair shake?

Speaker 4 Look, Mollet also said point blank, she called this a power grab by Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 And she also said she worries that people think that this is just some kind of legal or academic argument we're all having. And it's not.
It's actually being actualized in real time.

Speaker 4 And people like Malloy are like, look, this is a five-alarm fire for what could happen to the government if you are someone who believes that these agencies should remain independent and distanced from political influence.

Speaker 3 All right, let's take a quick break and we'll have more to discuss about what's at stake when we get back.

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Speaker 3 And we're back. So a question for you here.
I mean, politically speaking, this seems like a risky strategy. Does the country really want a sort of all-powerful president?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think there's like two contradicting things happening here. Because on the one hand, look, none of this is a secret.
As we all know, Donald Trump spent the entire 2020.

Speaker 4 Like, he's not doing anything he didn't say he was going to do. He wanted to run like a strong man.
He was going to fix it. He even joked at one point, I'll be a dictator for a day.

Speaker 4 Like, it was applause lines on the campaign trail. He has campaigned on the idea that he was going to be a more powerful president like any before him.
So look, he's doing what he said.

Speaker 4 So So, I think from Trump's supporters' viewpoint, you're like, look, he's delivering. Promise made, promise kept.
On the other hand, you're right.

Speaker 4 Like, there isn't a lot of indication that this is something that the country is clamoring for.

Speaker 4 One of the pieces of polling data that stood out to me in the 2024 campaign, especially as Donald Trump was campaigning this way, is Vanderbilt University does the Unity poll, and they explicitly ask people, Do you want to expand the powers of the presidency?

Speaker 4 The vast majority of Americans kind of like the constitutional balance of power the way it is.

Speaker 4 So, yes, Trump is potentially provoking a very risky fight with the country because it's not clear to me that he actually has public support for what he's doing.

Speaker 4 The thing I will say candidly is this stuff's kind of obtuse, right? Like the workings of the SEC and the FEC and how the executive branch functions is not a kitchen table issue.

Speaker 4 And so I think that the White House feels like, especially with the support of so much of the right legal movement saying this is the right thing to do.

Speaker 4 Look, this was in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that's defined a lot of the modern-day Republican ideology.

Speaker 4 I don't think that they feel a lot of risk here because, again, he's not running for re-election again.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Sue, a follow-up there.

Speaker 3 I mean, isn't the argument from the Trump administration also, though, that people want government to work more, in his view, efficiently more quickly, and this would allow him, if he's the sole guy in charge, to sort of just do whatever he wants more quickly.

Speaker 3 And people want

Speaker 4 to see efficiency.

Speaker 4 I think that's the entire argument for it, is that if the president is judged by by what happens in these agencies anyway, shouldn't he actually have a political stake in the game in directing it and owning the political blame of whatever comes out of the federal government?

Speaker 4 You could make an argument.

Speaker 4 I think government watchdogs would, you know, take issue with it, that it would make for a more accountable president because everyone would know directly who to blame if there was issues with the government.

Speaker 5 You know, when we're talking about efficiency and whether people living all over the country see any effect of this kind of slash and burn personnel strategy here in D.C.

Speaker 5 I'm a person who covered white-collar crime and corporate fraud for about seven years earlier in my career.

Speaker 5 And I remember what it felt like when watchdogs at the Securities and Exchange Commission and at the Justice Department were not spending as much time looking at corporate books and records.

Speaker 5 And that had a big effect on people's lives because millions of people lost their retirement savings in one fell swoop with respect to companies like Enron and WorldCom and others.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the Trump administration is making this argument, especially at the Justice Department, that they want to root out weaponization.

Speaker 5 Okay, what they call the Justice Department inappropriately having gone after Trump and some of these January 6th defendants and the like.

Speaker 5 But the other side of that coin is that we have people like Jack Goldsmith, a very conservative law professor at Harvard, former DOJ official, who basically says these weaponization arguments sound to him like doublespeak, right?

Speaker 5 What's happening here is that the new people inside the Justice Department and inside the White House have very specific things they want to spend time on, immigration enforcement, and they have other things they don't want to spend time on anymore, which happens all the time in every administration.

Speaker 5 The challenge here is that the DOJ and the FBI have enormous power over people's lives. They can ruin people financially and psychologically just by investigating them for perceived crimes.

Speaker 5 And the fear is that some of the prosecutors who may be installed in some of these offices and in Washington may be taking cues from the president about whom to target.

Speaker 5 And that is a very dangerous thing for the rule of law and for individual people around the country.

Speaker 4 I also think that we have to consider what Trump is doing in the question of the ethical environment of government now too, because there's always been an argument in pro-democracy, Little D, that transparency makes for stronger governments.

Speaker 4 The reason that you have public records laws and transparency and disclosures is that good democracies are open to the public.

Speaker 4 One of the people I spoke to, Daniel Wiener, is from the Brennan Center, also a government watchdog group. And he said, like, look, these institutions aren't about the president.

Speaker 4 They're about the public interest.

Speaker 6 Watchdogs are there to ensure that government does its work in the public interest. They're not perfect.
They make mistakes. They could be improved.

Speaker 6 But to just sweep away all of those checks to just have nothing other than, you know, the will of the president is law is a very, very dangerous situation.

Speaker 4 And Weiner made the point that Trump is making all these decisions at a time when he is also not offered what the ethical guidance for his administration is going to be.

Speaker 4 It is very typical for new presidents to put out an executive order outlining the ethics rules for the executive branch. Some presidents have taken it more seriously than others.

Speaker 4 Former President Barack Obama, for example, had really strict rules over whether lobbyists could serve in his administration. And Trump hasn't done that.

Speaker 4 He's taking really dramatic, potentially government-remaking actions at a time where he also seems at least less interested than previous presidents in having gold standard ethics rules for his administration.

Speaker 3 Aaron Trevor Barrett, so let's talk about what this looks like in the long run.

Speaker 3 Let's assume, for the sake of this argument, that Trump is successful in bringing more functions of government under his direct control. So what happens then? when Trump's not in power?

Speaker 3 I mean, what happens, say, if a Democrat's in power?

Speaker 4 I love this because this is a question that I put to John Yoo as well, because I joked, I said, look, I like to quote the modern-day political philosopher Mitch McConnell, who once warned Democrats when they were changing the rules of the Senate, you're going going to regret this and you're going to regret it sooner than you think.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump's not going to be president forever.

Speaker 4 And he could be creating a framework by which a Democratic president or an independent president or a far left progressive president comes into a presidency that is now unshackled by independent agencies, watchdog groups, and less accountability to the public.

Speaker 4 And I said, what does someone like John Yu do if it's a liberal president takes office one day?

Speaker 6 This is not a Republican-Democrat issue. It used to be actually after World War II in the wake of FDR and Truman, Kennedy and LBJ.

Speaker 6 Democrats used to be the ones who liked the unitary executive and it was Republicans like Taft who opposed it. So I don't think it's a really Republican-Democrat thing at all.
So you're right.

Speaker 6 These reforms will ultimately play to an advantage of a Democratic president someday.

Speaker 4 I think this is a really big deal. What is happening inside the executive branch and how he could remake it is potentially seismic.

Speaker 4 If he is successful by any measure, and he will be successful by some measures, but if he can really take this to the extreme, the presidency will be a fundamentally different job when Donald Trump leaves office than when he took office, at least potentially the biggest remaking of the federal government since at least Watergate.

Speaker 3 Well, on that note, that is a wrap for today. I'm Asma Khalid.
I cover the White House.

Speaker 4 I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

Speaker 5 And I'm Carrie Johnson.

Speaker 3 I cover the Justice Tournament. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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