Claims that Donald Trump poses a grave threat to democracy likely contributed to Democrats' smashing success in Tuesday's elections.
Ironically, the president's efforts to bring more democratic accountability to government may prove to be one of his most durable achievements – despite persistent progressive pushback poised to ramp up under divided government.
Although Trump is often described as an impulsive, undisciplined leader, he has remained sharply focused on advancing reforms aimed at increasing presidential power over the unelected federal bureaucracy. RealClearInvestigations' review of dozens of executive actions and agency regulations found that the Trump administration has taken historic steps to shrink the branch of government he runs, make agencies more accountable to elected officials, and reduce Washington's regulatory control over the private sector.
A Trump official told RCI that the administration is working to "dramatically reduce the size and power of the administrative state" in order to "reestablish the President's constitutional authority over the Executive Branch" and carry out the agenda Americans elected him to pursue.
These efforts have reduced the federal workforce to levels unseen since the 1960s and generated hundreds of billions of dollars in cost savings. They have also produced Supreme Court rulings affirming presidential authority to remove subordinates and rein in independent agencies, along with deregulatory savings estimated at trillions of dollars.
"[F]rom almost the first day of the president's second term, the administration has been at work in the most extensive project since the New Deal to recapture for the elected branches what has been given away over many decades to the permanent bureaucratic class," Hillsdale College professor Ronald J. Pestritto wrote in a monograph lauding the president's initiatives late last year.
The president's critics – Democrats and their allies in the media, at think tanks, self-described good-government groups and labor unions – have assailed these efforts as creeping authoritarianism. Casting Trump's reforms as an "assault" on the bureaucracy and an attempt to "politicize the federal workforce" – which has historically included a disproportionate share of Democrats – they have pledged to undo them.
"We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has warned. "We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create."
Although Democrats will control both chambers of Congress next year, the center of gravity of their resistance will likely continue to be in the courthouses where they have challenged the president's agenda, alleging unconstitutional overreach and procedural ham-handedness. Through hundreds of lawsuits, many still pending, they have opposed everything from firing employees and eliminating offices to withholding appropriated funds.
Legal scholars say these battles over the scope and contours of presidential authority and the Constitution's separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches may have significant long-term ramifications. They also note that litigation moves slowly; many cases are not likely to be resolved until Trump leaves office. As a practical matter, often buoyed by a Supreme Court that has blocked lower court injunctions thwarting Trump's orders, the president has meaningfully reshaped the bureaucracy.
Ironically, by expanding presidential control over the executive branch, Trump may also empower his successors, including Democrats.
Shrinking the workforce
From the start of his second term, President Trump vowed to "dramatically reduce the size of the Federal Government, while increasing its accountability to the American people."
Through a series of executive orders, he froze federal hiring across most agencies, directed the Department of Government Efficiency to help cut the federal workforce through deferred resignation programs and reductions in force (RIFs), and required agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four departing employees. During its first year, the administration has shrunk the workforce by 220,000 to 250,000 workers – a 10% decline. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a critic of the cuts, described them as "the largest one-year reduction in the federal workforce in over 75 years, dating back to the demobilization following World War II."
The decline has not been evenly distributed. The Center's analysis indicates that Trump has targeted executive branch departments whose work he questions. These include the Department of Education (down 39%), the State Department and associated agencies (down 37%), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (down 23%). His policies have also sparked mass exoduses from specific areas like the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Conservatives have long considered the division a bastion of progressive activism. Up to 80% of its staff reportedly left. The administration has replaced those 300 departing employees with 130 hires of its own.
NOT WIDELY REPORTED: The collapsing Federal government workforce, which fell in August to 2.67 million employees, the lowest level in more than 60 years, going back to May 1966. pic.twitter.com/tefuR4EGnS
— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) September 6, 2026
Federal employees, their unions, and Democrats have assailed these moves as politically motivated – which they clearly are, as Trump seeks a bureaucracy that is both less powerful and more responsive to his policies. The president's critics argue that government workers deserve protections separate from the demands of their boss. "These firings are not about poor performance," Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in 2025. "They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence."
Across the various suits, Trump's opponents have claimed the president lacks authority to implement these downsizing policies without congressional approval, and that the processes by which he has downsized are unlawful or violate applicable rules and regulations.
The legal record remains mixed, as plaintiffs – including federal employees, unions, states, and nonprofits – have challenged Trump's policies through a variety of legal theories in different courts. In many instances, they have enjoyed initial success, securing preliminary injunctions in favorable jurisdictions that paused the policies. The Supreme Court, however, has rejected several requests to block the policies or allowed them to proceed during litigation. In July 2025, the high court stayed a lower court injunction that sought to block the president's order authorizing widespread reductions in force, allowing the RIFs to proceed while the case remains pending. The high court also overruled lower court decisions regarding cuts to the Department of Education while litigation persists. By contrast, certain challenges to agency-specific cuts have resulted in the administration rescinding RIFs, for example at the Health and Human Services Department.
Even in cases where federal employee challengers have received favorable rulings, they have still been left stymied. When the Trump administration fired more than 20,000 probationary employees last year, a federal judge found the policy to be unlawful. But given the time that had elapsed between the firings and the ruling, he did not order their reinstatement.
The president's opponents proved most successful in blocking an attempt to remove several thousand workers during last year's government shutdown, securing favorable rulings that ultimately led the administration to abandon its plans in a settlement. In one recent and notable case, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, the daughter of former anti-Trump FBI Director James Comey, successfully challenged her firing, with a federal judge ruling that it was "not authorized by any statute" and violated civil service protections. That case, however, has not been resolved, as the administration has indicated it will appeal.
Even as litigation stretches on, as a practical matter, the president has been able to shrink the workforce.
Restructuring the bureaucracy
One of Trump's most controversial efforts aims to restructure the bureaucracy to carry out his agenda by asserting authority over several entities, some with powers, funding, and structure dictated in whole or part by Congress. Early in his second term, for example, he eliminated the non-statutory functions of the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution. He terminated a slew of advisory groups established by agencies themselves, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Health Equity Advisory Committee, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Academic Research Council by executive order.
The White House also mothballed the Federal Executive Institute, a training center for bureaucrats established by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that the Trump administration said contributed to the "enlarge[ing] and entrench[ing] of the Washington, D.C., managerial class… .”
Most controversially, the administration transferred the remaining functions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the State Department in July 2025, after freezing grants, canceling most programs, and laying off much of its 13,000-member workforce. Critics argued the shuttering of USAID, congressionally codified as an "independent establishment" within, but not of, the executive branch, was not only unlawful but that it could kill millions. The Trump administration has contended in court filings that it "has not abolished USAID," but lawfully "reorganized" it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in congressional testimony last spring, "The State Department has realigned foreign assistance with the interests of the American people, streamlined disaster response capabilities, and leveraged the ingenuity of American companies to save lives."
Like the federal employees Trump let go, USAID, as a practical matter, is gone, even as associated litigation persists.
Removing resistance
To further assert that executive branch employees must ultimately be responsive to the executive, Trump has sought to expand presidential power to hire and fire executive branch officials in influential perches to advance his favored policies. His opponents say these efforts threaten the rights of federal workers and the purported independence that federal agencies, in their defenders' views, are owed.
On the president's first day in office, he issued an executive order making it easier to remove senior officials in policy-influencing positions not only for insubordination, misconduct, or poor performance, but also for resisting or undermining the executive. This led to the reclassification of so-called career employees into at-will positions, stripping them of myriad civil service protections, including removal and appeals procedures that the White House said led agencies to "seldom remove" them even if they engage in "egregious conduct or subversion of Presidential priorities."
All told, the president's order enabled the administration to reclassify 8,000 career positions among the senior-most ranks, such as agency directors, deputy directors, and chiefs of staff, as "at-will." Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a self-described nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to "build a better government and a stronger democracy," panned the policy. "This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president's bidding," he said. Litigation remains pending, but no injunction has halted the practice.
The president has also sought to increase control over the bureaucracy by creating a new category of "Schedule G" employees, allowing him to hire political appointees, who do not require Senate confirmation, involved in "policy-making or policy-advocating work." Such roles had previously been reserved for career employees, who, the administration argues, might not "faithfully implement the President's policy agenda."
While the share of non-confirmed, Trump-appointed senior leaders is historically high, at a rate of nearly 12% as of March 2026, such hires still numbered under 3,000 as of July of this year – a fraction of 1% of the total federal workforce.
In a potentially looming battle, House Democrats and their allies have proposed a series of reforms to combat what they describe as "politicization." These proposals would impose stricter caps on certain classifications of political appointees and on senior appointee rates, prohibit the creation of new categories of appointees or at-will employment absent congressional approval, and require greater disclosure regarding political personnel. Past efforts, however, have languished.
Corralling 'independent' agencies
The president's most enduring policy push to command personnel, and by extension policy – as well as to corral the administrative state broadly – may be his successful legal challenges to precedent regarding the executive's power to remove the leaders of so-called independent agencies. The legislative branch generally created such agencies – such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – though they have occupied something of a constitutional gray area. Led by multi-member boards or committees that are presidentially appointed but Senate-confirmed, and often bipartisan in composition by law, they frequently take on a mix of legislative, executive, and judicial duties. Despite being part of the federal bureaucracy, and arguably an organ of the executive branch, such agencies have at times pursued policies independent of, and sometimes contrary to, the president's. Since the 1935 case Humphrey's Executor – in which the Supreme Court ruled President Franklin Roosevelt's firing of an FTC Commissioner on policy grounds unlawful – their leaders had enjoyed statutory protections against removal without cause and, in President Trump's view, were insulated from democratic accountability.
Early in his second term, President Trump challenged Humphrey's Executor by firing several Democratic appointees without cause, including FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Merit Systems Protection Board Chair Cathy Harris, and National Labor Relations Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox.
Slaughter's case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. In June, in a landmark 6-to-3 ruling, the high court found that the congressional stipulation that FTC commissioners could only be fired "for cause" violated the separation of powers. Since the Constitution "vests the whole executive power in the President," the Court found, his inferiors must be removable at will.
The following day, the Supreme Court denied Cathy Harris' appeal of her removal. On Oct.19, the court refused to grant a petition for writ of certiorari from Gwynne Wilcox challenging her firing.
Responding to the Trump v. Slaughter ruling, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley Law School, and a Trump critic, said, "I think agency independence is now gone." He added, "Agencies, like cabinet departments, will need to do what the president wants."
His Berkeley Law School colleague, John Yoo, a conservative, agreed. "The presidency just gained the most constitutional power, at any one time," he said. "There is no more independent administrative state."
Centralizing policy
Trump has also sought to control the actions of a federal bureaucracy, including the independent agencies, that issued regulations and took actions during his first administration that were at variance with his policies and goals.
A Feb. 18, 2025, executive order required "all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies," to submit major regulatory actions for review to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The order also mandated that agencies could no longer adopt independent legal interpretations when issuing regulations or guidance or advancing positions in litigation. It required, instead, that they operate solely pursuant to and consistent with the opinions of the president and attorney general.
The president also weakened the power of the bureaucracy by issuing executive orders combating "anti-competitive" regulations. These moves came on the heels of a Trump administration directive on Jan. 31, 2025, that for every new regulation promulgated, at least 10 prior regulations were to be eliminated.
Ultimately, in its first year, the Trump administration would vastly surpass that target. By the end of fiscal year 2025, the Trump administration had taken 646 deregulatory actions and just five regulatory actions, achieving a dramatic 129-to-1 ratio.
According to the American Action Forum, a self-described center-right group led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, as of Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2026, the Trump administration has achieved net regulatory cost reductions of approximately $1.6 trillion.
While the administration's deregulatory actions number in the hundreds, the nonprofit credits nearly all savings to three deregulatory actions: rolling back the EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding, revising vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, and revising power plant carbon emissions standards.
The executive branch Council of Economic Advisers calculated in an April 2026 report that the long-term impact of the president's regulatory reforms will generate over $5 trillion in savings.
The Office of Management and Budget – under which OIRA sits – has played pivotal roles in related areas as well. In May, it proposed a joint interagency rule, alongside more than three dozen other agencies and departments, that would grant the executive significantly greater control over the distribution of $1 trillion in federal grants and financial assistance annually. Under that rule, senior appointees designated by agency heads would review all grant applications using their "independent judgment" – not deferring to agency peers – to ensure awards are consistent with the "national interest." For existing grants, the rule would also make it easier for authorities to terminate or suspend them to the extent they conflict with "agency priorities" or "the national interest." Congress has prohibited the administration from finalizing the so-called "Uniform Grants Regulation" before Dec. 11, 2026.
OMB has also been a key player in helping the president pursue rescissions, including contested pocket rescissions, reinvigorating a power that lay largely dormant over the last 50 years, to withhold several billion dollars in funds appropriated for programs or activities that the president has deemed inconsistent with America's national interest. Parties have sued the president over some of the rescissions, with the Government Accountability Office – which is tasked by Congress with reviewing such efforts – finding the recent $810 million package to be unconstitutional and unlawful. The courts have yet to resolve these cases on the merits.
Live by EO, die by EO?
Virtually every executive branch reform the president has undertaken has come under legal siege. And many such cases remain pending. A future president may seek to reverse Trump's actions, as the Biden administration did previously.
The president's critics see his efforts to command the executive branch as self-aggrandizing and self-serving. They view reversing his reforms and restoring the bureaucracy as an existential priority. "Once we get through this nightmare," Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has said, "the rest of our careers will have to be devoted to reviving American progress and building institutions that endure and succeed."
Other Trump critics, who position his efforts as a "political" assault on a "nonpartisan," "merit-based" administrative state, say the president's efforts could endure.
"Although executive orders and regulations can be undone by future administrations," Rachel Potter, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has asserted, "they may leave behind a durable legacy. … If courts uphold these reforms, they may establish precedents that entrench a politicized civil service and complicate a full return to a merit-based administrative state."
One irony is that future Democratic presidents may be empowered by Trump's reforms to impress their own stamp on the executive branch. Another irony is that even as an emboldened Democratic-controlled Congress may seek to undo the president's efforts in the next two years, some scholars believe his moves were necessary because of the legislative branch's failure to exert its own authority.
"As important as it is in our republic for the president to bring the bureaucracy under his control," Hillsdale College scholar Pestritto has written, "and thus under the control of the voters who elected him, the only reason this necessity presents itself is because Congress has, by law, long ago abdicated the bulk of its Article I powers in creating, empowering, and funding the administrative state."
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.Source link
