There is broad agreement among Republicans that the government, particularly the federal bureaucracy, is too bloated for its own good. And despite coming into office with such power vested in the executive, President Donald Trump has overseen an aggressive effort to slash his own branch, to the relief of conservatives in Congress.
“I think President Trump is doing exactly what he got elected to do. He got elected to secure the border, get rid of inflation, [and] stop this unbelievable growth of the federal government,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital.
“I think we have to go back and always follow the Constitution,” he explained, adding that the executive branch should not have the “regulatory power” that it has amassed over the years.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., added that he is “all for cutting out the rot and the waste,” and previewed some of the Trump administration’s changes being codified through a rescissions package in Congress, for which only 51 votes are needed in the Senate.
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A White House official pointed to the significant public sector job growth under President Joe Biden, noting the federal government’s massive expansion in just the last four years.
“For all the talk of ‘Donald Trump is going to be a dictator on day one, he is ignoring the judicial branch,’ This is a president who, on day one, made it his mission to reduce the size of the executive branch in an effort to make it more efficient and to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse,” the official told Fox News Digital. “That doesn’t sound like a dictator to me.”
Former Trump attorney Jim Trusty explained that Congress “certainly” deserves the blame for both “excessive and wasteful spending.” However, “they maintain the power of the purse and there is no line item veto,” he said, noting that they largely still control “expenditure power.”
“I think Congress has been derelict in a lot of ways and the judicial branch is exercising too much authority, so I do not believe we are at much risk of an ‘imperial presidency,’” Trusty said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, posted on X this week that the executive branch has grown “too powerful.” Maloy appeared to be trying to clarify an earlier statement made during a town hall at which she expressed concern about the executive branch needing to be “under control.”
“Do I think America is drifting towards authoritarianism? No. I have only hope and optimism about the direction our country is headed. Do I think the executive branch is too powerful? Absolutely,” Maloy wrote. “It’s been growing for decades. We need smaller federal agencies and we have a unique opportunity to do something about it. The president is doing the tough work of trimming back the executive branch.”
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Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the trend of Congress giving up some of its power saw its most critical moves in the 19th century.
“If we had to characterize it at a 30,000-foot level, we would probably say this – first, generally, the 19th century was Congress in power, right? The federal government didn’t do very much – like, long before the New Deal in the 1930s, long before the Great Society in the 1960s, Congress really was in the driver’s seat in all sorts of ways,” Binder told Fox News Digital.
“They were setting tariff laws, they were building railroads, they were building roads, they were building ports and so forth. That’s quite a bit different than the 20th century and certainly moving into the 21st century.”
Binder said the change over time was likely due to a combination of factors, including expediency – and politics.
“Some of that is just a function of crisis. And Congress is…reactive. It’s not really well suited for responding swiftly in a crisis,” she said. “The other part is kind of electoral, right? Lawmakers realize some of these issues and matters are kind of politically contentious, like tariffs. And you begin to see in the early 1930s, Congress giving those powers to the president.”
“I mean, you get a sense of it right now with even some Republican lawmakers not happy about the tariff war that Trump has instigated, but at the same time, they seem quite happy that they’re not in charge of setting those tariffs.“
Former assistant US attorney and Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy argued that the administrative state “is not quite the same thing as the executive branch,” specifying that “so-called independent agencies as the SEC, FTC, and Federal Reserve” are “not directly under presidential control,” despite being technically under the executive umbrella.
According to McCarthy, Trump’s problem is that statutes were used to create the agencies, and they “can only be repealed by statute.”
“He has difficulty paring them back because statutes and court decisions limit his ability to fire the officials who run the agencies,” McCarthy explained.
“That is why DOJ is trying to get the current Supreme Court to overrule the Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision — it supported the creation of independent agencies…that wield multiple kinds of power…and that place restrictions on the president’s authority to fire agency heads.”
In Humphrey’s Executor vs. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the president could not unilaterally remove officials from quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial bodies, such as the Federal Trade Commission.
Overruling that decision would vastly expand the president’s power to control who works for federal offices outside of Congress or the courts.
“Schedule F” is another classification for government workers that gives the president greater control over their respective offices. “Schedule F” broadly classifies a large swath of federal workers as at-will, making it much easier to fire or lay off workers en masse.
Critics of Trump’s move earlier this year to expand “Schedule F” have said it gives the president too much power to fire workers who are supposed to be in apolitical roles. Supporters, however, contend the move would make government more efficient and cut bureaucratic waste.
