Targeting U.S.A.I.D. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “two of the most liberal-leaning agencies, is likely telling,” Bonica wrote. “The hardest-hit agencies are precisely those that regulate industry, protect public health and expand access to education.”
The cuts DOGE is calling for, Bonica argued, fulfill an authoritarian agenda, closely following the proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The underlying goals include:
Frame political purges as administrative reform: This framing masks the potential for politically motivated actions, such as targeting agencies that enforce environmental regulations or protect civil rights.
Target agencies that constrain executive power: The Project 2025 document specifically calls for significant alterations or dismantling of agencies like the E.P.A., the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and potentially the Department of Homeland Security.
Weaken regulatory enforcement without changing laws: Project 2025 advocates for rescinding numerous regulations, streamlining permitting processes, and reducing funding for agencies responsible for environmental protection and labor standards. This weakens enforcement without requiring the more challenging and public process of legislative change.
Replace career civil servants with loyalists: The project document repeatedly emphasizes the need for political appointees in key positions, even those traditionally held by career professionals. Project 2025 explicitly praises the idea of replacing career officials with “aligned political appointees,” ensuring the bureaucracy executes the executive’s agenda without resistance.
What’s known as “unitary executive theory” provides the theoretical basis for Trump’s expansion of executive authority.
In 2020, “The Unitary Executive: Past, Present, Future,” Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, professors at Harvard Law School, wrote:
It is a bracingly simple idea.
Article II, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution vests the executive power in “a president of the United States.” Those words do not seem ambiguous. Under the Constitution, the president, and no one else, has executive power. The executive is therefore “unitary.”
It follows, as the night follows the day, that Congress lacks the power to carve up the executive — to say, for example, that the Secretary of Transportation is a free agent, immune from presidential control, or that the Secretary of Commerce can maintain their job unless the president is able to establish some kind of ‘cause’ for removing them.”
Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., described the legal status of unitary executive theory in an email responding to my inquiry:
The Supreme Court rejected the theory during the New Deal, which is why we have independent agencies. Justice Scalia gave powerful impetus to the unitary executive branch theory in his dissenting opinion in the independent-counsel case, and the Roberts court in several decisions has moved doctrine closer to the theory. The question has been how far that court would go, and the Trump administration is clearly going to push the boundaries as far as the court will let it go.
Trump has often expressed support for his own extreme version of the unitary executive theory. On Feb. 16, on Truth Social, for example, he declared himself above the law, posting, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” repeating a variation of a quote attributed to Napoleon.
In a Feb. 19 post on Truth Social in which Trump claimed to have killed congestion pricing in New York, he proclaimed: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
In March, 2023, Trump announced at the annual CPAC convention,
I am your warrior, I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. I will totally obliterate the deep state.
Trump’s vision of himself has been reinforced by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in July 2024 in Trump v. United States. The ruling granted Trump “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and “at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
