Can Trump Strong Arm Congress Into Destroying Federal Agencies? | Opinion

Last week, the Supreme Court voted, 5-4, with justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the liberals, to smack down the Trump administration’s “pause” in payments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to federal contractors for work that had already been completed. While it was narrowly decided and may not predict how the court will rule on future cases involving Trump’s effort to impound funds authorized by Congress, it is already part of a pattern of systematic legal defeats for the new Trump administration. As Trump prepares an almost comically illegal executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, it is worth asking why the administration keeps issuing patently absurd edicts that are likely to be narrowed or set aside.

The administration’s goal has been to “move fast and break things,” but the thing that has broken most often so far is their legal strategy. Unable or unwilling to move cruel spending cuts and other huge changes through a narrowly divided congress, the Trump administration has instead been trying to sneak them through the side door via executive order, a strategy that has met with mixed results so far.

Courts have blocked, among many other things, Trump’s efforts to force universities to dismantle DEI programs, freeze funding for scientific research, alter the funding formula for grants issued by the National Institutes of Health to universities, ban certain kinds of medical care for trans patients and eliminate birthright citizenship. There are 23 ongoing lawsuits against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its lawless operations, one of which— Elon Musk’s attempts to grant members of his private Gestapo access to the Treasury Department’s payment system—the Trump administration lost. The administration has also been blocked by a federal court from completely gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Supreme Court is likely to weigh in on many of these cases, and it is possible Trump will prevail in some. But the administration’s efforts to abolish federal agencies authorized by Congress are likely to meet the same fate as their attempts to stiff USAID contractors. And by now they must know that even the most pliant Supreme Court in the country’s modern history is unwilling to let the administration set aside the role of Congress in either spending decisions or the creation and abolition of executive branch agencies. And that means that Trump’s barrage of doomed executive orders is more likely aimed at shaping congressional behavior and signaling that a failure to dismantle, for example, the Department of Education will be seen in Trumpworld as a primary-able offense.

Republican members of Congress have very strong electoral incentives not to comply with the president. The administration’s indiscriminate mass layoffs of federal workers, its careless blockage of grants to schools and universities, as well as its unconscionable decision not to pay farmers for delivery of food for USAID operations have all met with increasingly heated opposition from voters even in deep red districts. A true abolition of the Department of Education would be felt by every single Republican member of Congress. The fact that Trump’s capricious destruction of everything in sight is correctly associated by voters with economic turmoil, price increases, hiring freezes even in the private sector and an overall quite sour consumer outlook should concern them.

But I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Trump will bully his way into getting much of what he wants from Congress. His putative allies are, after all, terrified of harassment and physical violence from the army of released insurrectionists that Trump all but commands himself. The path of least resistance for them continues to be rolling over for whatever whim the president wakes up feeling on any given day.

Getting outrageously unqualified and dangerous people like FBI Director Kash Patel and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through a submissive Senate with 50 or more Republican votes was an unmistakable signal that even occasional opposition to Trump’s bizarre behavior and demands has collapsed. The president is out there dismantling the Atlantic security alliance against Russia that at least half of the GOP’s Senate caucus spent their careers loudly supporting—and without much more pushback than some grumbling on background with reporters.

Trump needs Republicans to roll over for unpopular spending cuts because the alternative is just to take a bunch of L’s and hope that the MAGA faithful don’t notice that the Department of Education still exists. When the dust settles and it becomes clear that a large percentage of Trump’s executive order binge accomplished precisely nothing, Republican members of Congress will be faced with a black-and-white choice: get those changes accomplished through regular legislation, even if in some cases it means a carveout for the Senate’s filibuster rule, and take the heat from the general electorate, or stand firm, become a lifelong target of MAGA harassment and violence and lose your seat in the next partisan primary.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.