Six days ago, little-noticed amid all the head-snapping hullabaloo of his first month in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that will likely have crucial and far-reaching consequences for executive power within our republican form of government.
The order, titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies” notes first that the Constitution “vests all executive power in the President and charges him with faithfully executing the laws,” and therefore directs “all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, [to] submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.”
Translation: You unelected bureaucrats within the executive branch are no longer free to subvert the power vested in me by the American people and the Constitution.
This executive order is the latest and greatest effort by Trump to rein in those “so-called independent agencies.” On his first day in office, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board Chairwoman Gwynne Wilcox, a Biden appointee, as well as canning Democrats from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Special Counsel. Legal challenges have ensued, and the landing place of at least one of these challenges will likely be the Supreme Court. “And,” as the Washington Examiner’s editorial board predicts, “Trump will most likely win.”
Why? Because the Framers never intended the executive branch to be peppered with potential saboteurs. As the Examiner’s editors write: “The authors of the Constitution clearly separated the legislative, executive, and judicial powers into three branches of government and then carefully designed a system of checks and balances to assure the democratically accountable use of those powers. That balance was then eroded and corrupted over time, creating an unelected fourth branch of government that was unaccountable to the people. For decades, conservatives have fought to restore the original vision of the founders. Trump is making that vision a reality.”
That so-called fourth branch is, of course, the massive federal bureaucracy that thwarted Trump during his first term. But not this time, he says.
How did we come to this? “Such agencies,” write The Wall Street Journal’s editors, “took root during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson in particular disliked the Constitution and wanted government by bureaucratic experts shielded from political control.”
Last week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller schooled the White House press corps on precisely this matter, delivering an Article II crash course to the assembled media. Miller began by briefly noting their failure to report on Joe Biden’s mental incompetence; then, he shifted to their failure to understand how our constitutional system works. “It is also true that many people in this room who have used this talking point that Elon is not elected fail to understand how government works,” he said. “So I’m glad for the opportunity for a brief civics lesson.”
Omg.Stephen Miller just gave every reporter in the White House briefing room a civics lesson over the narrative that Elon Musk is the “unelected President.”This is so good. pic.twitter.com/ECNlWH2t1m— johnny maga (@johnnymaga) February 20, 2025
Miller noted the American president’s Article II powers under the Constitution’s Vesting Clause, whereby “the executive power shall be vested in a president, singular,” who then “appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.” Then he named the real threat to our republican form of government: “The threat to democracy — indeed the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime-tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who [believe] they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.”
Boom.
As for those Framers, here’s what Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70:
Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.
Further down in his lengthy explication, Hamilton argues “that it is far more safe there should be a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people; and, in a word, that all multiplication of the Executive is rather dangerous than friendly to liberty.”
What can “independent” and potentially subversive alphabet agencies such as the CFPB, FCC, FEC, FTC, SEC — even a Federal Reserve — be if not a “rather dangerous” multiplication, a diffusion, of the executive branch? When we elect a president, we expect him to carry out our will. But in order to do so, he must be vested with the power to fully, not partially, control his coequal branch of government. Otherwise, how can we fairly hold him accountable?
Donald Trump is absolutely right to claw back these executive powers from the left-leaning Leviathan bureaucracy. When the time comes, let’s hope the Supreme Court agrees with the president — and with the Constitution’s framers.
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