How shrinking the government adds power to the presidency
Asserting authority to cut government is DOGE's most profound accomplishment to date
Addition through subtraction sounds like magical thinking, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the federal government now. On the subtraction side of the equation, we have dramatic reductions in federal government employees, agencies, and grants. On the addition side, we have scholars and government watchdogs sounding alarms about a dramatic expansion of executive authority.
There’s something counterintuitive about this. How can the authority of the government's chief executive be growing while the reach of government itself is shrinking?
It’s even more puzzling in historical context. If we think back to the last US president who was politically controversial in his unorthodox use of executive authority, we see a sharp contrast with the modern version. I’m referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. president in the 1930s and ‘40s, who has been recognized as a US president with authoritarian tendencies.
Between a massive expansion of the welfare state, mostly to respond to an economic depression, internment of Japanese Americans at the outset of the second world war, threats to substantially reform the Supreme Court that provided unfavorable resistance to Roosevelt‘s actions, and ducking the well established norm of serving only two terms in office, it’s not hard to see how the authoritarian label get applied to Roosevelt.
Of course, ideologically, Roosevelt and Trump could hardly be further apart. Roosevelt's expansion of executive authority came with a massive expansion of the federal government itself. He claimed and exercised authority for a wide array of policymaking responsibilities not previously claimed by an American president. The shift was so profound that historians regularly mark Roosevelt’s term in office as the beginning of what is referred to as the “modern presidency.” Trump’s philosophy about government, to the extent he has one, is at best narrower than FDR’s and at worst is utter disdain for the enterprise.
Philosophical differences between Roosevelt and Trump about the proper role of government have important implications for how their norm- and institution-breaking behavior is interpreted. The primary unit that President Trump has used to reshape government is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is neither a department nor focused on efficiency.
As Don Monahan recently articulated, the “move fast and break things” philosophy makes “sense when firms are in a competition to become the dominant actor in [an] industry that fuels the creation of private monopolies and untold riches. It makes less sense when you are already a public monopoly, and are subject to capacity constraints and real public accountability.”
He goes on to point out that the promise of updating and upgrading tech in government has failed under DOGE because it did not bother to understand how technology works in government:
DOGE missed their best opportunity to actually live up to their brand as tech disruptors who could fix things. Now, their brand will be the tech bros who broke government.
The DOGE project has been ambitious. It has eliminated one agency of government (USAID), and terminally crippled others, such as USIP and Voice of America, with grand plans to dissolve entire departments, such as the US Department of Education. The changes that DOGE has implemented in personnel and funding at a number of agencies in the federal government have been so profound as to redirect the fundamental mission at places like the Department of Health and Human Services. The loss of subject area experts in everything from airplane safety to disease control devastates the government’s capacity to produce public goods.
By making the government smaller DOGE is asserting an authority never granted to it.
While ambitious efforts to improve government efficiency and reduce waste in government have been a goal in many modern presidential administrations, only the approach taken by Trump’s DOGE has had the added effect of expanding the scope of executive power. This sort of addition by subtraction is not novel.
Perhaps the most famous example of expanding government authority by tying its own hands is the foundational Supreme Court decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803). This is the foundational decision that essentially grants the Supreme Court the power of judicial review, or the power to declare laws unconstitutional.
In this case, William Marbury petitioned the court to grant him a government appointment. The Court ruled that Congress inappropriately and unconstitutionally gave the Court the power to grant or deny such an appointment. In doing so, the Chief Justice reduced the narrow power of the Court in similar cases, but by interpreting the Constitution in the decision, Marshall established the power of judicial review for the Supreme Court, which had not been previously articulated. The power to interpret constitutionality is far greater than the power to compel an appointment. It was one little bit of subtraction, and one giant leap of addition.
We see the same thing with DOGE. By making the government smaller, eliminating employees, reducing agency footprints, and revising department missions, DOGE is asserting an authority that was never granted to it. The very act of changing the contours of the federal government in this way, and critically without challenge from Congress, establishes a new authority in the presidency and the executive branch.
Importantly, there has been some pushback in the Courts, which the administration has mostly, but not entirely, heeded. Still, Congress is the critical branch for defining the scope of the federal government, authorizing funding, and appropriating support for government services. The courts have no mechanism to be proactive, only reactive. Congress can, theoretically, be both, but chooses not to out of misplaced partisan loyalty.
So until Congress decides otherwise, Trump and DOGE apparently have a magic wand and will continue to wave it until something stops them.