This morning, I’m sharing my interview with Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times and co-author of the new book “Mad House,” an informative, entertaining, and more-than-a-little-dispiriting look back at the 118th Congress.

The 118th Congress, for those of you who don’t remember, was the Congress of the 15 chaotic ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker. And the unprecedented vote to remove McCarthy as speaker. And the four ballots that eventually led to Mike Johnson, a relative unknown, becoming speaker. And it was the Congress of George Santos. And of a high-stakes debt ceiling showdown. And, as if those domestic partisan battles weren’t enough, two actual wars were taking place throughout.

It was, as Annie told me, the Congress that “really broke” the institution as a whole.

In the interview, Annie and I discuss:

• Donald Trump’s ability to keep congressional Republicans in line

• Whether anything could happen that would cause the GOP to break with Trump

• How much the chaos of the last Congress still hangs over the Hill today

• Whether Democrats are about to face a Tea Party moment

• How long Mike Johnson will remain as speaker

• Steve Bannon’s continuing influence over Republican politics

• How members of Congress feel about Congress

• What in the world Jamie Raskin and Lauren Boebert text about

And more!

Annie also shares her picks for most compelling members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and dishes on how many Republicans are true MAGA believers vs. how many are just playing along.

I really enjoyed talking with Annie, and the book is a great read as well. I hope you’ll check out both. Here’s another link to “Mad House.” The video above includes a preview for everyone, but the full thing is available exclusively for paid subscribers.

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President Trump scored two victories at the Supreme Court on Monday — although neither of them was a sweeping win. Let’s break it down:

The most notable ruling came in Trump v. J.G.G., the case brought by five Venezuelan men suing to prevent the Trump administration from deporting them under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798.

As you may recall: Trump signed a proclamation invoking the AEA on March 14, designating members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) as alien enemies. The administration said that this gave them broad powers to deport those they deemed as TdA members without due process.

On March 15, U.S. district judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to temporarily refrain from deporting the five men until legal questions involving the administration’s use of the AEA were resolved. Later that day, he certified all Venezuelan migrants being targeted under the AEA as a class and broadened his order to temporarily block any deportations under the law.

However, by that time, 137 Venezuelans being deported under the AEA were already on planes bound for a notorious El Salvador prison. Boasberg verbally ordered the administration to turn the planes around, which they did not do, later arguing that they weren’t bound by a verbal order and that Boasberg lacked jurisdiction anyways. He eventually formalized his order in writing, but the planes had already landed. The administration has not tried to invoke the AEA since then, in keeping with Boasberg’s order.

That was the status quo until Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to lift Boasberg’s temporary block on deportations under the AEA. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who has been increasingly breaking from the court’s conservative wing, joined the liberals in dissent.

You can read the court’s unsigned opinion here, but essentially, the justices sided with the Trump administration on a technicality: they ruled that challenges to a use of the AEA can’t be brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, as lawyers for the Venezuelans had tried to do, but instead have to be brought as habeas corpus cases. Habeas corpus (Latin for “you should have the body”) is the process by which a prisoner can challenge the legality of their conviction and confinement.

The two things about habeas cases that are relevant here: 1) they have to be brought individually, which means the Venezuelans can no longer challenge the administration as a class, and 2) they have to be brought in the district in which a prisoner is being kept. In the case of the five Venezuelans, that’s in Texas, which is why the justices dissolved Boasberg’s order: since he’s based in D.C., he was the wrong judge to go to, the Supreme Court ruled.

The Venezuelan men will have to restart their legal fight in Texas. In the meantime, there is no legal order stopping the administration from resuming use of the AEA.

But there’s a catch. The justices also ruled that migrants targeted under the AEA are entitled to judicial review — not only after they are deported, but before.

“AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act,” the court’s majority wrote. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

This is not how the administration had interpreted the AEA up until this point: they had previously been deporting people under the AEA without any notice or opportunity for due process. Notably, a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanuagh underlined that “all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available,” which means that even the most conservative justices supported that aspect of the ruling.

Beyond that, the majority opinion didn’t delve into the broader questions at issue in the case, including whether the AEA — which can only be used in cases of a “declared war” or “invasion” waged by a “foreign nation or government” — applies to TdA, which has ties to the Venezuelan government but is not a formal state actor.

The ruling also didn’t weigh in on the administration’s alleged non-compliance with Boasberg’s order: the judge is still considering holding the administration in contempt, although he may be less likely to do so now that the Supreme Court has said he was the wrong judge for the case to be brought to in the first place.

Finally, the court declined to shed light on legal opportunities available to the Venezuelans who have already been sent to the El Salvador prison, some of whom claim not to be TdA members at all.

Which brings us to the next case that saw SCOTUS action on Monday: Noem v. Abrego Garcia.

This is a case involving someone who is presently in the El Salvador prison, although he was not deported under the AEA. The plaintiff is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvador native who illegally entered the U.S. in 2011.

Abrego Garcia was arrested in 2019, when the government cited a confidential informant in alleging that he was a member of the MS-13 gang. An immigration judge ruled that that “the evidence shows that he is a verified member of MS-13”; another judge later said Abrego Garcia could be deported, but ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because of dangers he would face there.

The government had never tried to deport him somewhere else, and he’s been living in Maryland since then — until last month, when the government did send him to El Salvador, despite the order expressly forbidding that. The Trump administration has openly acknowledged its mistake in court, saying Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error,” but has also argued that they have no way to return him to the U.S. and no court can order them to do so.

U.S. district judge Paula Xinis disagreed with that, and ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by the end of the day yesterday. An appeals court later upheld Xinis’ order.

But Chief Justice John Roberts stepped in on Monday to pause Xinis’ order. Roberts’ paragraph-long order relieved the government from having to comply with the approaching deadline, but offered no indication of how the case will unravel after that.

Roberts called for more legal filings, signaling that he paused the deadline so he could have more time to consider the broader case before deciding whether or not Abrego Garcia should be returned.

It’s hard to read anything into the pause one way or the other: in February, Roberts issued a similar order temporarily pausing a district judge’s order on foreign aid funding, before siding with the court’s liberals (and Barrett) to uphold the same order the next week.

How the court eventually rules in this second case, involving Abrego Garcia, could give a hint as to how the court will handle those alleged TdA members implicated in the first case who have already been sent to El Salvador with an unclear pathway to legally challenge their detainment.

In general, it feels as though the court is trying to give away as little as possible in its rulings in Trump cases. In all the disputes that have reached them so far, the justices have rarely tipped their hand, generally ruling on technicalities or deadlines rather than opining much on the merits.

Most of these cases have concerned temporary restraining orders, rather than final opinions, so it makes sense that the court’s opinions would be composed of process questions — but, even so, many have been structured in a way that makes it very difficult to deduce even a signal of where the court might eventually rule when the disputes inevitably return to them.

The court’s conservative majority certainly seems in no rush to confront Trump, but neither do they seem to be in a rush to endorse his sweeping legal arguments — at least, not with Roberts and Barrett there.

Whether the court is leaning towards rejecting or embracing Trump’s theories of executive power, this much is clear: they don’t want to do it yet, and they have no desire to give any hints of which way they’re leaning until then.

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More news to know

• CNN: US stocks off to major bounce back from their tariff doom spiral

• AP: China says it will ‘fight to the end’ after Trump threatens to impose still more tariffs

• NYT: How Trump’s TikTok Negotiations Were Upended by China and Tariffs

• WaPo: Musk made direct appeals to Trump to reverse sweeping new tariffs

• NBC: RFK Jr. says he plans to tell CDC to stop recommending fluoride in drinking water

• NPR: The U.S. will hold direct, high-level talks with Iran, Trump says

• Politico: Trump, Hegseth promise record $1 trillion Pentagon budget

• ABC: Trump admin tells prosecutors to ease up on crypto enforcement

• Axios: U.S. Catholic bishops end refugee partnerships with federal government

The day ahead

• President Trump will sign an executive order on tapping coal power and deliver remarks at a fundraising dinner for the House GOP campaign arm. Trump will also reportedly meet with a group of House Republicans, in an attempt to persuade them to support the Senate-passed budget resolution, which several conservatives have threatened to oppose.

• The Senate will vote to confirm Elbridge Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, George Glass as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, and Mike Huckabee as the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

• The House will vote on the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would limit the power of federal district courts to issue a nationwide injunctions.

• The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled.

Now, let’s head to the Badger State…

Hakeem Jeffries and Elon Musk don’t agree on much, but they agree on this: the future of the U.S. House could be decided today.

No, not in a pair of Florida special elections that are for actual House seats. We’ll get to those later.

Instead, the House Democratic leader and the top Trump adviser are referring to a contest that, on its face, doesn’t appear to have anything to do with Washington: a race to fill a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Here’s their logic. The state’s Supreme Court is currently composed of four liberal justices and three conservatives. Today’s election is for a seat being vacated by one of the liberals; that means if the Democratic-backed candidate wins, liberals keep their majority on the court. If the Republican-backed candidate wins, a 4-3 liberal majority will become a 4-3 conservative majority.

What does that have to do with Congress? Well, Democrats believe that Wisconsin’s congressional district lines are unfair. In the 2024 elections, Republican candidates won 51% of the statewide House vote, while Democrats won 48%. But, because of the way the lines are drawn, Republicans ended up with six seats and Democrats won only two.

Democrats tried challenging the map last year, but the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The court did not reveal how each justice voted, but one of the liberals did not participate, which likely contributed to the result.

“As soon as possible, we need to be able to revisit that and have fair lines,” Jeffries said last week. “The only way for that to even be a significant possibility is if you have an enlightened Supreme Court.” In other words: Democrats want to challenge Wisconsin’s congressional map again, but they’ll only have a shot at getting the lines redrawn if they win today’s court race.

With Republicans poised to defend one of the narrowest House majorities in history, even one or two Wisconsin seats going from red to blue — or red to purple — could go a long way towards deciding the 2026 midterms. “What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives,” Musk said at an event in Green Bay this weekend.

In fact, he said, the stakes are even higher: “Whichever party controls the House, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. I feel like it’s one of those things that may not seem it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”

No biggie.

The Wisconsin race is nominally non-partisan, but no one is under any illusions about the leanings of the candidates.

The liberal contender is Dane County judge Susan Crawford, who served as chief counsel to a former Democratic governor. The conservative candidate is Waukesha County judge Brad Schimel, who formerly served as a Republican state attorney general.

Crawford has received donations from the Wisconsin Democratic Party and Democratic billionaires like George Soros; Jeffries referred to her as the “Democratic candidate.” Schimel is endorsed by President Donald Trump. Both of them have generated controversy with their overt partisanship: Crawford participated in an event for Democratic donors billed as a “chance to put two more House seats in play,” a fairly obvious reference to her potential role over redistricting. Schimel has promised to be part of a “support network” for Trump.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the two candidates and their allied groups have spent more than $90 million on the contest, making it the most expensive judicial election in American history. (“Only” half as much — $45 million — was spent on the previous record-holder, Wisconsin’s 2023 Supreme Court race.)

The winner will have sway over a range of hot-button issues, not just congressional redistricting. The state Supreme Court has already agreed to hear a case seeking to recognize a constitutional right to bodily autonomy, including abortion, in Wisconsin. (A separate case, on the constitutionality of an 1849 state law banning abortion, will already be decided by the time Crawford or Schimel takes the bench.)

The court is also poised to hear a challenge to a state law ending collective bargaining rights for most public employees, which sparked mass protests and a recall fight after being signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) in 2011. In addition, the court struck down GOP state legislative district maps in a major ruling in 2023; Republicans could seek to revisit that decision if conservatives retake the court.

Oh, and Tesla is also mired in a legal battle that could reach the state Supreme Court, challenging a Wisconsin state law that prevents auto manufacturers from operating their own car dealerships in the state.

Even with those significant policy implications for the state, the race is set to reverberate beyond Wisconsin.

As the first major election since Trump’s November victory, it will be treated as a referendum on the president — and on Musk, the ubiquitous figure of his second term.

Musk has loomed over the Wisconsin election, not least because his political group America PAC has spent $12.2 million backing Schimel, more than the $11.6 million Schimel’s own campaign has spent. Another PAC with ties to Musk, Building America’s Future, has poured $6 million more into the race; Musk himself has personally donated $3 million to the Wisconsin GOP.

The Tesla CEO-turned-White House adviser visited the state this weekend (wearing a cheesehead, of course), handing out a pair of $1 million checks to Schimel backers. (The state Supreme Court declined to hear a case from the state’s Democratic attorney general challenging the legality of the giveaway.) Musk has tweeted about the Wisconsin race more than 70 times.

Democrats have also placed Musk at the center of their efforts, hoping that his controversial work in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will ultimately redound to their benefit. Wisconsin Democrats staged an ad campaign and statewide tour titled “People v. Musk”; Crawford referred to her opponent as “Elon Schimel” in a debate.

Musk has similarly been the star of Democratic messaging in a pair of House special elections taking place today in Florida. The two races are in deep-red territory: Florida’s 1st district, the seat vacated by Matt Gaetz when he was briefly poised to become attorney general, and the state’s 6th district, vacated by national security adviser Michael Waltz (heard of him?). Both districts went for Trump by at least 30 points in November.

Republicans are favored in both seats — but the margins will be closely watched to see how much they swing from November. In particular, the GOP has been gripped by last-minute worries about the Waltz seat.

(Another election to keep an eye on: Wisconsin voters will also decide whether to enshrine a photo ID requirement for voting, currently a state law, as a constitutional amendment. Trump devoted a Truth Social post to the amendment fight on Monday.)

But be careful about making too-broad assumptions about tonight’s results. Special election voters are not representative of the wider electorate: they generally tilt whiter, older, and better educated.

This sort of highly engaged voter used to lean Republican; now they are firmly planted in the Democratic coalition. If Democrats win in Wisconsin and overperform in Florida — as most observers expect — it won’t necessarily be sign of how the country at large is reacting to Trump’s second term. It may simply be a barometer of how highly engaged voters are feeling. And we already know that group leans blue.

Still, a gauge of enthusiasm among the country’s most engaged voters can still tell us some things. Even if special election voters are a poor stand-in for the country’s general mood, they are closer in kind to voters who turn out for midterm elections, a group that is also more politically engaged than your average American.1

That means both parties are looking at today’s races as the first testing ground for strategy and messaging ahead of the 2026 elections. Musk is already making plans to export his Wisconsin operation to other states; meanwhile, Democrats will likely take successes tonight as proof that their best message is a Musk-centric one.

If Schimel wins, Wisconsin Republicans will “have to thank Elon,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said recently. But if Crawford comes out on top, Musk will likely receive the blame, potentially hurting his standing within the White House.

Either way, perhaps for the first time since Donald Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, you can now make a credible case that the political universe revolves around someone who isn’t him. 70 days into Trump’s second term, American politics are suddenly all about Elon.

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The Trump administration acknowledged in a Monday court filing that it mistakenly deported a man with protected legal status back to El Salvador. However, the administration argued that a court lacked jurisdiction to order the man’s return now that he is out of U.S. custody. The man was deemed by an immigration judge in 2019 to be a likely member of the MS-13 gang.

Over the weekend, the U.S. deported 17 more alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to the same notorious El Salvador prison. (The Alien Enemies Act was not used as a legal authority.) Meanwhile, federal judge blocked the Trump administration from curtailing a temporary legal status that shields 600,000 Venezuelans from deportation.

President Trump pardoned a January 6th rioter whose sentence he had previously commuted and commuted the sentence of a second Hunter Biden associate who testified against the ex-First Son. The Biden associate had been serving a 14-year prison sentence for defrauding Native Americans and other investors.

He also signed an executive order to combat price gouging in live entertainment by cracking down on ticket scalpers and nominated former New York Rep. Anthony D’Esposito to be Labor Department inspector general. While in Congress, D’Esposito was accused of putting both his mistress and his fiancée’s daughter on the government payroll.

The Trump administration has launched a review of $8.9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard over claims of antisemitism at the school.

DOGE staffers gained access to a payroll system for federal employees over objections from IT staffers who feared it would make the information more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Paragraph that caught my eye: “President Trump’s tariffs could drive up prices. His efforts to reduce the federal work force could increase unemployment. But ask economists which of the administration’s policies they are most concerned about and many point to cuts to federal support for scientific research.” (New York Times)

• Related: “Trump administration fires workers at NIH's Alzheimer's research center, including incoming director” (ABC News)

Influencer watch: “Joe Rogan Splits From Trump on ‘Horrific’ Deportations” (The Daily Beast) … “Dave Portnoy on Signal scandal: ‘Somebody has to go down’” (The Hill)

The day ahead

All times Eastern.

• President Trump and Vice President Vance will have lunch together at 12:30 p.m. The president will then sign executive orders at 3:30 p.m.

• White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will hold a press briefing at 12 p.m.

• The Senate is in a standstill as Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has held the floor in a marathon speech that has now stretched more than 15 hours. (He is speaking in opposition to the Trump administration broadly, rather than filibustering any specific bill or nomination.) Whenever Booker finishes, the chamber is expected to hold a vote on a Democratic resolution to undo the national emergency that underpins Trump’s Canada tariffs. The resolution could receive enough Republican support to pass.

• The House is scheduled to vote on two resolutions to overturn Biden-era regulations. However, to vote on them, the chamber will first have to pass a “rule” — which could be complicated by GOP leadership’s attempt to include a provision in the rule resolution blocking a bipartisan measure to allow proxy voting for lawmakers who are new parents.

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over whether Americans wounded in terrorist attacks in the Middle East can sue the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization in U.S. courts.

Reporting on Donald Trump is always a bit like drinking from a firehose, with way more news coming out at any given time than one person can possibly cover.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has issued 97 executive orders — which means he’s signed more in 60 days than any president since Harry Truman has in an entire year, according to the Federal Register. And it’s not just what gets published in the Federal Register, of course: there are also tweets, Truths, endless press gaggles, and more to contend with.

There were several points this week where I considered covering Trump’s social media post announcing that Joe Biden’s pardons for the January 6th committee are “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” because Biden signed them using an autopen. This raises a lot of questions that the political nerd in me was interested in, but I opted against writing about it because a) I don’t want to get in the habit of chasing down every single Trump remark and b) in this case, like many others, it felt most prudent to wait and see whether anything substantial would come of the post, or whether it was just the president musing to himself (and 9.3 million followers) shortly after midnight.

In the era where presidents bugged their own offices and recorded everything they said (not too wise, in retrospect), there were tons of examples of Richard Nixon, most famously, mentioning various proposals to his aides, many of which never happened because the advisers ignored him or talked him out of it. A blog post on the Nixon Foundation website refers to that ability to vent to his aides, knowing that his orders would only be followed if they felt he was serious, as a “kind of safety valve that has not been available to subsequent Presidents.” Sometimes it feels like Trump has found a similar safety valve, not in an H.R. Haldeman but in Truth Social (and, before that, Twitter) — except it’s public, for all of us to see.

As a reporter, that transparency is both immensely helpful (as it gives an unprecedented window into what the president is thinking) and fairly complicating (since it’s not always clear what will and won’t actually happen). Two months shy of ten years into Trump’s political career, it still feels like the broader political ecosystem hasn’t adjusted to being so privy to a candidate/president’s innermost thoughts: plenty of commentators can always be counted on to jump immediately on whatever Trump says (in either a positive or negative fashion), even before it’s clear whether the words will be backed by substantive action. (To be clear: the president being the president, sometimes his words are important to cover even if they are detached from action. But sometimes isn’t every time.)

Oftentimes, I feel like people on both the left and right would just have a much better experience of the Trump years — and not find themselves as needlessly frustrated or excited, respectively — if they simply took a beat and waited to see what kind of Trump comment we are dealing with. (There are plenty of examples to cite for the left; one example for the right is the recent release of the JFK and Epstein Files, which many conservative commentators awaited with bated breath only to find that a lot of the “new” documents were duplicates.)

In the end, I was probably right not to devote an entire piece to Trump’s autopen remarks. (Although now you will never get to read my painstaking analysis of a 2005 Justice Department memo on the question!) White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt eventually indicated that no Justice Department investigation was going to spring out of the supposed pardon revocations. Trump was merely “begging the question” of whether Biden had used autopen, Leavitt said, even though his social media post certainly had seemed definitive (it even used the word “hereby”). Trump was trying to troll Biden and move attention back to his enfeebled predecessor, it appears, more than he was trying to prosecute Liz Cheney. (Of course, if that ever changes, I will cover it in full.) Onto the next controversy.

The autopen incident was on my mind Thursday, when I was at the White House for the signing of Trump’s 95th second-term executive order, which he said would “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.”

I wanted to cover the event in-person1 because I was curious whether Trump would offer any more details of what his changes to the department would look like, in order to separate out what kind of Trump news item this was. He didn’t offer many.

Trump — flanked by several schoolchildren sitting in classroom-style desks — only spoke for 14 minutes, brief by his standards. He took time to call out the dignitaries in the room, including (potential future Supreme Court justice?) Ron DeSantis, who at one point thought that this was the kind of order he’d be signing in his White House. (“Great. Loved it. Awesome,” DeSantis told me as he exited, when I asked him what he thought of the event.)

The president also introduced the person who he said would hopefully “be our last Secretary of Education,” Linda McMahon. “It’s an interesting opening,” he acknowledged, although he later promised, “we’re going to find something else for you” once the department is abolished. But it wasn’t exactly clear what that abolition would look like.

The order itself directs McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities,” while adding the caveat, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” This is not a small caveat. The Education Department was created by the Department of Education Organization Act (DEOA) of 1979, which means it can only be abolished by a subsequent act of Congress.

McMahon has suggested that the various components of the agency could be distributed to other departments, such as placing its civil rights office inside the Justice Department. (Project 2025 makes the same suggestion.) But that will be difficult legally as well: the DEOA mandates that there “shall” be in the Education Department an “Office for Civil Rights.” The law includes the same language for many of the agency’s largest divisions, including the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Postsecondary Education, and several others.

Trump also said Thursday that the “core” functions of the department would continue, naming Title I funding for K-12 schools, Pell Grants for college undergrads, and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding for students with special needs. (These programs are all enshrined in law, as is the federal student loan program, which Trump did not mention. According to CNN, the administration has looked into farming out the student loan program to another agency, but no other department wants to take it.)

If you look at a breakdown of the Education Department’s funding, those are exactly the main programs that the agency operates; once you cross them out from the list of potential changes to the agency, you aren’t left with many major functions.

Trump’s event was framed around promises to de-nationalize education, but states and cities — not the Education Department — already set curricula. (Interestingly, and unusually for a Republican president, Trump cited Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as model countries that outperform the U.S. on education. All three do have national curricula.) A big part of the Education Department’s role is disbursing funding to schools and students, which cannot be adjusted without Congress (and Trump said himself would not be affected).

The rest of what the agency does is more subject to change, including issuing regulations, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and conducting education research. But those functions were always going to be shrunken back in a Trump administration, even without a flashy order to dismantle the department. If anything, so far, the Trump team hasn’t really been scaling back these sorts of regulations and investigations; it’s simply been redirecting them towards their own ends. The same Office for Civil Rights that McMahon wants to cut off has been quite active during Trump’s term, opening investigations into 45 universities that offer race-based scholarships and sending letters to 60 others about antisemitism.

Trump’s Thursday order also directed the Education Department to ensure that any programs receiving federal funding “terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.” Again, that isn’t a directive that suggests plans to close the agency; it comes off more like a plan to continue the department, but with a new ideological focus.

All that said, even if the aforementioned offices are legally required to stay open, Trump can try to shrink their size — something he was already doing before Thursday, having laid off almost 50% of the department. Those efforts have quickly drawn legal challenges, with a group of parents alleging that the agency cannot carry out its statutory obligations with such a reduced workforce. Ultimately, as with so much else, it will be up to the courts to decide how far Trump will be able to push.

At the White House on Thursday, Trump reeled off statistics to identify a very real problem: “70% of 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or in math,” he noted, using data from the “Nation’s Report Card,” collected, ironically, by the Education Department. “40% percent of 4th graders lack even basic reading skills.”

If Trump wanted to spark a necessary conversation about education reform in the U.S. — about whether the country is getting its money’s worth for all it spends on education, and about whether the state/federal balance on the issue needs to shift — the only forum available to spark real change is Congress. But he has not submitted any legislative proposals on the issue, or indicated any plans to. Trump bragged (correctly) that while several Republican presidents have promised to close the Education Department, he is the first one to make moves towards actually doing so.

But, without trying to involve Congress, his effort will merely join the heap of broken promises; moving through executive action only has the effect of making his own agenda more limited and, ultimately, reversible and ineffectual. This is true on many other issues as well. This week, Politico obtained a document laying out the Trump administration’s proposed changes to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), many of which would require passage of a law, as the document itself acknowledges.

Obviously, different people will take a different view of the merits of the proposal, but if you do take the view that USAID needs reform, then it’s a well-thought-out plan for doing so, in contrast to the administration’s haphazard (and, according to a judge, likely unconstitutional) early moves inside the agency. Now that the administration has a plan, we’ll see if they try to spark a legislative conversation about foreign aid and advance it on the Hill. Otherwise, Trump is once again just “begging the question”: throwing an issue out, but doing little beyond unilateral actions subject to being undone by the courts or by his predecessors. That approach guarantees maximum attention (both negative and positive), but it makes lasting (or even temporary) policy change unlikely. And it only makes his presidency weaker, not stronger.

Similarly, we’ll see if the administration eventually puts forward a plan for reorganizing the Education Department, and actually putting Trump’s words into action. Until they do, I’d recommend refraining from commenting on the impact of the proposal — whether it’s excites you or upset you — since the proposal doesn’t really seem to exist yet.

For all the fanfare I witnessed at the White House on Thursday — and all the cheering attendees, excited at the thought of the department’s imminent demise — I didn’t hear a plan for making it happen. If I do, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Rachel and I talked about:

• How Gen Z is reacting to the opening months of Trump’s administration (cautiously)

• How young voters are reacting to the Democratic responses to Trump (poorly)

• Which Republicans and Democrats are effectively reaching young people on social media

• Gen Z’s isolationist streak in foreign policy

• The one issue that Trump isn’t about talking about that could hurt the GOP among Gen Z

• And more!

I also mentioned this poll result from More in Common, which I find so striking that I think it’s worth sharing in full:

Almost 90% of Baby Boomers — cutting across party lines — believe that President Trump should “always follow the Constitution, even if means he sometimes can’t get things done.” That number drops down to 53% among Gen Z, the slimmest of majorities on what older generations see as the most obvious of questions.

31% of Gen Z (and 42% of Gen Z men, the group told me) believe Trump “should get things done, even if it means sometimes ignoring the Constitution.” That is higher than any other demographic group, whether you’re looking at race, income, gender, party, or level of education.

Some mood music for you as you think about how my generation is approaching politics.

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The reality is a bit more complicated. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the lines of responsibility of the three branches of government actually overlap quite a bit more than that model lets on — including in some ways that have never really been tested.

What would happen if Congress, which has the power of the purse, defunds the White House or the Supreme Court and then passes the law over a presidential veto, denying the other branches money to carry out their operations? Or if the executive branch, which is the one actually charged (through the Bureau of the Fiscal Service) with sending out the payments that the legislative branch approves, declines to spend the money Congress tells it to? Normally, you’d say the judicial branch could step in…but then you’d remember that the judiciary’s enforcement arm, the U.S. Marshals Service, is housed within the executive branch. I told you there’s a lot of overlap.

Those types of scenarios would send us into constitutional crisis territory, but there are also more normal, less acute ways that the simple legislative-executive-judicial branch model doesn’t hold up.

One of them is independent agencies. Most arms of the government operate pretty much the same: Congress funds them, and the president supervises them. That’s how, say, the State Department works, or the National Park Service. But there are other agencies where it’s more complicated. The Federal Reserve, for example, isn’t funded by Congress, and the president doesn’t get a say in its decisionmaking. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in turn, is funded by the Fed.

The executive branch also includes officials, like immigration judges, whose functions are judicial in nature, and even one — the vice president — who presides over the Senate, the upper chamber of the legislative branch. Still more agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, are acknowledged to be both quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative, since they have the ability to decide legal disputes and issue regulations. The interbranch lines are sometimes blurry.

Here’s a more accurate depiction of what our government looks like, in all its confusing glory:

No matter your opinion on the legality of this system, it’s clearly something of a fragile patchwork, with agencies that technically fall under the executive branch but also aren’t fully accountable to it. People have been warning about this almost since the advent of independent agencies. Before there was Elon Musk, there was Louis Brownlow, a political scientist who chaired the “President’s Committee on Administrative Management” under Franklin Roosevelt — sort of the original DOGE, an effort to reorganize government right at the beginning of the modern administrative state.

In its final report, the Brownlow Committee referred to independent agencies — many of which had emerged as part of FDR’s New Deal — as making up “a headless ‘fourth branch’ of the Government, a haphazard deposit of irresponsible agencies and uncoordinated powers.” The report added:

The independent commissions present a serious immediate problem. No administrative reorganization worthy of the name can leave hanging in the air more than a dozen powerful, irresponsible agencies free to determine policy and administer law. Any program to restore our constitutional ideal of a fully coordinated Executive Branch responsible to the President must bring within the reach of that responsible control all work done by these independent commissions which is not judicial in nature. That challenge cannot be ignored.

At the same time, the commissions present a long-range problem of equal or even greater seriousness. This is because we keep on creating them. Congress is always tempted to turn each new regulatory function over to a new independent commission. This is not only following the line of least resistance; it is also following a fifty-year-old tradition.

Reader, the challenge was ignored. Independent agencies kept on being created, just as Brownlow predicted, and they kept on headlessly hanging in the air, a governmental question mark.

And here we arrive at the Trump angle. (You just knew there would be a Trump angle!) Trump is trying to finish what Brownlow started, by bringing the independent agencies — an alphabet soup that includes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to name a few — under presidential control once and for all.

Last week, Trump signed an executive order that declares “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch” — including the (suddenly-not-very-independent) independent agencies. These agencies, which previously operated with little presidential oversight, will now be required to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review.

Trump has also attempted to fire several independent agency officials, including commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The executive order and the firings are an attempt to re-envision the independent agencies from how they were understood both by Congress at their creation and by the Supreme Court in subsequent rulings: as bodies within the executive branch, but outside the president’s purview.

In the landmark 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Roosevelt could only remove an FTC commissioner for the specific reasons allowed by Congress. (The commissioner in question, William Humphrey, had died by the time the case was brought, hence its initiation by the executor of his estate, whose name the court apparently never bothered to learn.)

Here’s what the court had to say then:

We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named. The authority of Congress, in creating quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies, to require them to act in discharge of their duties independently of executive control cannot well be doubted, and that authority includes, as an appropriate incident, power to fix the period during which they shall continue in office, and to forbid their removal except for cause in the meantime. For it is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter’s will.

The 1935 court had no problem with the whole blurry-lines conception of government. The FTC, the justices said, “was created by Congress as a means of carrying into operation legislative and judicial powers, and as an agency of the legislative and judicial departments,” not just the executive branch.

The Trump administration is not shying away from the fact that its firing of independent agency officials violates the spirit of Humphrey’s Executor. In fact, in a letter earlier this month, the Justice Department notified lawmakers that it plans to “urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision.” The administration is actively trying to force a legal fight over the nearly century-old precedent.

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So, we’re all caught up on this governmental gray area — and how it’s about to be tested in the courts. Now, get ready for things to get even grayer.

One of the independent agency chiefs who Trump has tried to fire is Hampton Dellinger, the Biden-appointed head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which is charged with protecting the rights of federal employees, especially whistleblowers. (This is different than the Justice Department special counsels, like Robert Mueller or Jack Smith, although they also occupy complicated constitutional ground.)

By law, OSC heads — like other independent agency officials (including Humphrey, the late FTC commissioner) — can only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But when Trump dismissed Dellinger with a letter on February 7, he didn’t name any of those reasons. So Dellinger sued, and an Obama-appointed district judge temporarily halted his firing, ruling on February 10 that Dellinger could remain in office while the case went through the courts. The Trump administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, making this the first Trump-related dispute to reach the justices since the beginning of his second term.

Rebuffing Trump, the court declined to block the judge’s order, which the judge then extended yesterday, allowing Dellinger to remain in his job at least through Saturday.

Things get even stickier from here. Separately from the independent agency firings, the administration has fired thousands of probationary employees, federal workers who are relatively new to their current positions. Six of them sought relief from Dellinger, following the proper process for federal employees who believe they have been fired for reasons other than performance (which is generally the only reason Congress has said they can be fired).

Dellinger agreed with the workers, and — again, following the proper process — recommended their cases on February 21 to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), a self-described “independent, quasi-judicial agency in the executive branch,” which has the power to pause a federal employee’s firing. The MSPB also sided with the six employees, ruling Friday that they could keep their jobs at least through mid-April as the OSC continues to investigate.

But here’s the catch: Trump also tried to fire the chair of the MSPB this month; she, too, is still in her job because a federal judge paused her dismissal.

So you have six federal employees who were fired, but still temporarily hold their jobs, because of the recommendation of a federal official who was fired, but still temporarily holds his job, which was then approved by an agency led by yet another official who was fired but still temporarily holds her job.

Now you see what I mean by zombies! The United States government is currently populated by a bunch of half-dead half-fired officials, who continue to function in their roles — and are even spawning new zombie workers by re-hiring other fired officials, despite sort of being terminated themselves. Annnnnd many of these zombie officials work in agencies that were already arguably legal gray areas to begin with.

Got all that?

This whole mess already reached the Supreme Court, which basically decided to stay out of it (over the objections of liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would have formally rejected Trump’s request, and conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, who would have accepted it).

But the situation is worth watching because it will be back in front of the court before long. In fact, it seems primed to be the first major Supreme Court battle of Trump 2.0, the first opportunity for the justices to weigh in on the president’s attempts to expand executive power. Just last night, the Justice Department wrote the justices and asked them to reconsider their decision not to intervene in the Dellinger case, citing his intervention in the case with the six workers.

“In short, a fired Special Counsel is wielding executive power, over the elected Executive’s objection, to halt employment decisions made by other executive agencies,” the administration’s lawyers wrote. “The MSPB, the entity that respondent argues is responsible for supervising him, is deferring to his stay requests so long as the requests are rational. The MSPB, moreover, is being led by a Chairman who has herself been fired by the President, only to be reinstated by a district court. Those developments underscore the grounds for vacating the district court’s order.”

When the justices do eventually take up the case, it will serve not only as a test of their willingness to overturn Humphrey’s Executor — which would give the president unprecedented power over previously independent agencies — but also of their appetite for a broader legal argument that underpins these and other bold moves Trump has made in his second term.

That argument is the “unitary executive theory,” which basically contends that the president has complete power over the executive branch. If he wants to fire government workers, Congress can’t say he can only do so because of issues with their performance. If he wants to fire agency heads, Congress can’t say he can only do so because of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” If an executive branch agency wants to issue a regulation, they better have the president’s approval first.

The president — and the president alone — sits at the top of the executive branch, this theory goes, which means all of the employees in the branch should be answerable to him, and he should be able to fire any of them if he so chooses.

Going back to the earlier graphic, the argument of the unitary executive theory is essentially that any agency in red (even if they’ve traditionally been structured as independent) is part of the executive branch, and therefore the president has full power over them.

Proponents of the theory point to the Executive Vesting Clause of the Constitution, which states that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” But critics point to the tradition of separation of powers — as upheld by the Supreme Court in cases like Humphrey’s Executor — as proof that the Framers intended for authority to be split between the branches, even if in occasionally confusing, overlapping ways. The Founding Fathers were terrified of a powerful executive, these critics point out, and explicitly set up the American system so that the president would be limited, even in his own domain.

But supporters of the theory retort that the Framers, terrified as they may have been, still only created one executive, which means they intended for all executive power to ultimately flow in his direction. Article II of the Constitution mentions the president, not the FTC or the Office of the Special Counsel.

The words “unitary executive theory” have never come out of Trump’s lips, but he’s surrounded in his second term by advisers who embrace the philosophy, including Russell Vought, the White House budget director who has called on Trump to adopt a “radical constitutional perspective” in which “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Last week, the president’s executive order on independent agencies directed them to report their activities to Vought, who in turn reports to Trump. “The Founders created a single President who is alone vested with ‘the executive Power’ and responsibility to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’” a White House fact sheet on the order said, using the exact language of “unitary executive theory” supporters.

The theory has percolated in conservative legal circles for years — and, before that, was essentially advanced by Democrats like FDR — but few presidents have been as aggressive as asserting it as Trump in the last month.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sometimes aligned itself with the theory in the past, most notably in their ruling on presidential immunity last year. “The Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion in that case. In Trump’s first term, the justices ruled that the prohibition on firings in Humphrey’s Executor didn’t apply to some independent agencies, while keeping it in place for others.

Now, in attempting to fire Dellinger, Trump is asking them to do away with the precedent entirely. After years of daydreaming by conservative lawyers (some of whom now go by “Mr. Justice”), a key contention of the unitary executive theory is about to land before the Supreme Court — paving the way for a potentially major expansion of presidential power.

It will be an outcome almost a century in the making, thanks to a motley crew that includes a long-dead FTC commissioner, a New Deal-era political scientist, and a gaggle of governmental zombies.

For about 10 minutes on Tuesday, it seemed like House Republicans were headed for an embarrassing setback.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had scheduled a vote on passing a budget resolution, the first step in the reconciliation process that will allow Republicans to advance President Trump’s legislative agenda without being subject to the Senate filibuster.

But, at the last minute, Johnson canceled the vote: because of his razor-thin majority, he could only afford to lose one Republican defection, and there were several GOP members who were planning to vote “no.” It looked like House Republicans weren’t going to be able to advance the Trump agenda that night; they would have to keep negotiating.

Then, only a few minutes later, a new announcement came. After initially telling lawmakers that they were done for the day, Republican leaders called back their members. A breakthrough had been reached; the vote would be held after all.

“In my 15+ years covering Congress, I’ve never seen the leadership cancel a vote, send lawmakers home and then abruptly switch course and put the vote up,” veteran congressional reporter Jake Sherman wrote. “All within the course of about 10 minutes.”

In the end, the resolution advanced by the slimmest of margins: 217-215, without a single vote to spare. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a perpetual libertarian thorn in leadership’s side, was the lone Republican dissenter. Every Democrat voted against the measure, including Rep. Brittany Petterson (D-CO), who returned with her four-week-old, and Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA), who has been recovering from knee surgery complications. He traveled with an IV on the airplane and used a walker as he entered the House floor.

“Big First Step Win for Speaker Mike Johnson, and AMERICA,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this morning. Indeed, the vote was an impressive victory for Johnson, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat — with help from Trump, who once again proved his clout on Capitol Hill by making calls to the Republican holdouts, persuading them to flip their votes.

At the same time, this vote is better understood as the beginning of a long, hard road of negotiating, not the end of it. As Trump said, it is only a “First Step.”

To understand the difficulties to come, it helps to look at H.Con.Res.14, the resolution that was approved by the House yesterday.

If you click on it and scroll through its 58 pages, you’ll see that it isn’t written like other pieces of legislation you might have seen. Most bills passed by Congress are fairly specific: X dollars shall go to Y thing. Z action shall be illegal.

But the budget resolution — by design — is very vague. It’s supposed to be a blueprint for a longer process, just getting the ball rolling by etching out a general outline of how much money can be spent or cut in the reconciliation bill.

H.Con.Res.14 lays out four main elements that need to be included in the as-yet-written reconciliation package:

• It should increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.

• It should cut taxes by $4.5 trillion over 10 years.

• It should increase spending by $300 billion over 10 years.

• It should cut spending by $1.5 to 2 trillion over 10 years.

Which specific line items should lawmakers cut or increase? The resolution doesn’t say. Instead, the measure is intended to serve as instructions to each House committee, giving them guidelines for filling in the details.

For example, here’s the section on the Homeland Security Committee, which is supposed to come up with $90 billion of the $300 billion in spending increases:

It doesn’t say specifically where that $90 billion will go to, but the Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over border security funding, and we know that it is one of the main priorities Republicans want to boost in the reconciliation package. So you can read the above as essentially instructions to Homeland Security Committee to draft a $90 billion plan to increase border security funding.

The Judiciary Committee, which also shares jurisdiction over border security, was also instructed to spend $110 billion. And the Armed Services Committee — which oversees defense spending — was told to raise spending by $100 billion. Add those up, and you land at $300 billion in increased spending.

Then, these committees were told to decrease spending by at least these amounts:

• Energy and Commerce Committee (jurisdiction over health care and energy programs): $880 billion in cuts

• Education and Workforce Committee (jurisdiction over education and labor programs): $330 billion in cuts

• Agriculture Committee (jurisdiction over farmer assistance and food stamps): $230 billion in cuts

• Oversight and Government Reform Committee (jurisdiction over the civil service, the District of Columbia, the Census, and the Postal Service): $50 billion in cuts

• Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (jurisdiction over highways, transit, and aviation): $10 billion in cuts

• Financial Services Committee (jurisdiction over the banking industry and housing programs): $1 billion in cuts

• Natural Resources Committee (jurisdiction over fisheries, wildlife, national parks, mining, and Native American lands): $1 billion in cuts

I’ve given you a rough idea of what each panel covers but, again, the specific programs that will be cut in the reconciliation package have yet to be determined. This is how, for example, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) can push back on Democratic allegations that the measure will cut Medicaid by saying: “The word Medicaid is not even in this bill. This bill doesn’t even mention the word Medicaid a single time.”

That’s true! But the resolution does say this:

And, no, that passage doesn’t mention Medicaid once. But, consider, as this New York Times graphic shows, what spending the Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over:

It’s almost all Medicare and Medicaid! And Republicans have already ruled out cutting Medicare, which provides health insurance to Americans over 65, as part of the reconciliation package. So, in order to make the $880 billion in spending cuts that the resolution requires, the Energy and Commerce Committee will have basically no other options besides cutting Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans.

That’s how the resolution effectively calls for Medicaid cuts without using the word “Medicaid” once.

As the reconciliation process continues, all these holes will be filled in, and what’s now incredibly vague (“Energy and Commerce Committee, find us $880 billion!”) will become searingly specific (“we will save money by imposing work requirements on certain Medicaid recipients”).

That’s why the process will only get harder from here. The resolution that passed last night is the haziest, most zoomed-out version of the reconciliation bill that Republicans will ever be asked to vote on — and, even still, many of them only signed on after considerable arm-twisting. From here on out, the details of the legislation will only get clearer, which means any members who were hesitant at the first stage could grow to become fierce critics if they don’t like the specifics.

It’s easy(-ish) to vote for a broad outline. It’s a much bigger ask to vote for something binding. And, as you may recall, Speaker Johnson has almost no margin of error to work with.

The resolution that passed last night is what’s known as a “concurrent resolution” (hence its name, H.Con.Res.14), which means the next step in the process is for it to pass the Senate as well. The upper chamber has to pass the exact same resolution that the House passed, or the reconciliation process can’t begin.

This might take some arm-twisting, too. As I’ve covered previously, Senate Republicans have a very different idea of how to advance the Trump agenda: they want to pass the border security and defense spending first, and then cut taxes in a separate package, rather than doing it all in “one big beautiful bill,” as the House prefers.

Trump had appeared to endorse the House approach last week, paving the way for yesterday’s vote. But the president still seems to be vacillating, giving senators hope that he may yet support their plan. “So the House has a bill and the Senate has a bill, and I’m looking at them both, and I’ll make decisions,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, even though most in Washington thought the decision had already been made. “I know the Senate is doing very well and the House is doing very well. But each one of them has things that I like. So we’ll see if we can come together.”

It’s hard to know how to take that, but it probably means that the GOP will continue pushing forward with one bill, but that senators might make changes to the budget resolution — which would require another tough House vote, on the amended version. Once they agree on the outline, the work of actually crafting the reconciliation package will begin.

“Coming together” on both of these measures — the resolution and the package itself — will be no easy task, considering the sheer number of issues in the bill that Republicans are divided on:

• Medicaid. Several moderate members only voted for the resolution last night because they were assured that the Medicaid cuts will end up totaling less than $880 billion. But many conservative members only voted for the measure because it cut that much. That will be a hard circle to square — especially when you add in the fact that Trump appears skeptical of any Medicaid cuts in the first place, with some of his populist allies (see Bannon, Steve) warning against slashing the program.

• Tax cuts. Trump has laid out his tax priorities for the package: extending his 2017 tax cuts, lifting the salt and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, and cutting taxes on tips, overtime pay, Social Security benefits, and domestic production. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, at best — depending on how those cuts are structured — those priorities alone would cost $5 trillion, more than the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts allotted in the budget resolution. At worst, they could cost up to $11.2 trillion. It’s possible that the president won’t get everything he’s asking for. Then, add in the fact that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has demanded that the reconciliation package make the 2017 tax cuts permanent (something Trump endorsed this morning), not just extending them by 10 years, as the House has been planning. Making the tax cuts permanent would definitely cost more than $4.5 trillion. Ruh-roh.

• Debt ceiling. Dozens of House conservatives have never voted to increase the debt ceiling, always counting on it being done by a bipartisan bill that would pass with Democratic support. Now, Republicans are trying to increase the debt limit singlehandedly; everyone but Massie provisionally agreed to do so in the budget resolution yesterday, but actually voting to raise the debt limit in the eventual reconciliation bill could be another matter. There are many fiscal hawks who will only accept the debt ceiling hike if they are satisfied by the level of spending cuts in the final bill. Already, this is proving to be an issue. “Now let’s start to BALANCE THE BUDGET,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post this morning — but the House resolution would cut spending by $2 trillion, while cutting taxes and raising spending by a combined $4.8 trillion, punching a $2.8 trillion hole in the deficit. The GOP resolution itself lays out the next 10 years of projected deficits under their plan. A “balanced budget” would mean having no deficit, a far way off from the $2 trillion+ deficits Republicans themselves project. Freedom Caucus members won’t like to see that.

Republicans may have scored an important victory last night, but they have a lot more to hash out before they can start celebrating.

The itemized list is here, including hundreds of canceled news subscriptions, real estate contracts, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In total, DOGE says that it is responsible for around $55 billion in savings.

Upon further inspection, the claim does not hold up to scrutiny. As Bloomberg notes, the savings claimed on DOGE’s own website only add up to $16.6 billion. In addition, the largest savings the initiative claims are for canceling an $8 billion contract for “program and technical support services” at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Diversity and Civil Rights. However, that contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion.

Suddenly, we’re down to $8.6 billion in recorded savings, or 0.47% of the $1.8 trillion budget deficit the government recorded last fiscal year. (‘“Let’s balance the budget!” the website says.) And that’s assuming that all the savings DOGE claims are actually due to DOGE. Just scrolling around the website this morning, I noticed that it boasted $544,991 in savings from the closure of an office for a former president in Atlanta, Georgia.

Further research on the General Services Administration website confirmed that the square footage of the office matched the one that belonged to former President Jimmy Carter. Presumably, Carter’s post-presidential office is being closed because Carter died in December, not because of anything done by DOGE.

It should also be pointed out, as NOTUS does here, that even the true “savings” aren’t really savings, in the sense that none of them will go back to taxpayers or be used to pay down the debt. “Under the process for appropriating federal dollars, the funds are likely still sitting in government agencies’ coffers,” NOTUS writes, since agencies have to use the funds appropriated to them by Congress unless Congress allows otherwise.

No matter the actual amount of savings, the point of the website is clear: to (try to) prove that DOGE is working, that the initiative is succeeding in cutting government costs and taming the overgrown bureaucracy.

But, at the same time, Trump administration lawyers are engaged in a very different battle — proving DOGE’s constitutionality — that could hinge on waging the exact opposite case: arguing that the initiative has gotten done even less, not more, than people think.

14 Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit last week alleging that Elon Musk’s “seemingly limitless and unchecked power” — through his position at DOGE — “to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse” represent a violation of the Constitution.

Why? Because “Mr. Musk does not occupy an office of the United States and has not had his nomination for an office confirmed by the Senate,” the lawsuit says.

That’s a reference to Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, otherwise known as the Appointments Clause, which says:

[The president] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

But when is someone an “Officer of the United States” requiring Senate confirmation, and when are they an “inferior Officer” who can be appointed without Senate approval?

The best clues we have come from the Supreme Court’s 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, which is best known as a landmark campaign finance ruling. In that case, the court ruled that “officers” (or “principal officers”) are appointees who exercise “significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States.” And “inferior officers” are appointees who work under their supervision, advising “principal officers” or carrying out their orders.

This divide became a particular point of controversy during the Obama administration, when the president appointed a long list of “czars” (e.g. a “border czar,” an “AIDS czar,” etc.) who seemed to boast not just advisory, but decision-making, authority, even though many of them were never confirmed by the Senate.

At the time, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers pushed back, but no legal challenge was ever brought. In the decades since Buckley, even as the power of unconfirmed White House staffers has ballooned, the courts have offered little guidance on when an appointee is considered to be wielding “significant authority.”

In the DOGE case, the Democratic state attorneys general claim that Musk’s powers have gone above that threshold.

Musk has “engaged in a constellation of powers and activities that have been historically associated with an officer of the United States, including powers over spending and disbursements, contracts, government property, regulations, and agency viability,” they write.

Suddenly, the popular vision of DOGE — at times, advanced by Trump and Musk themselves — as a band of Musk-led vigilantes marching through government, slashing costs and taking names, could become a legal vulnerability.

In order to alleviate the appearance of Musk wielding “significant authority,” Trump administration lawyers have been forced to downplay Musk’s stature in court. In fact, in a court filing, White House official Justin Fisher attested that Musk is not even the head of DOGE, despite Trump repeatedly referring to him as such.

Rather, Musk is a special government employee and a Senior Advisor to the President, a title held by people like Karl Rove in the Bush administration and Valerie Jarrett in the Obama era. Like them, Fisher said, Musk operates as an employee of the White House Office, not as an employee (much less a manager) at DOGE.

“Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” Fisher added. “Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

An additional filing by Justice Department lawyers further clarified that DOGE lacks “the power to order personnel actions” at federal agencies, only to advise them, pushing back on allegations made by the states that brought the case.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who oversaw Trump’s January 6th case, is the judge in this case as well. On Tuesday, she rejected an immediate request from the state attorneys general, who had asked her to temporarily block Musk and DOGE from accessing data or making personnel decisions at seven federal agencies.

However, while writing that the immediate relief they sought was not proper “at this juncture,” Chutkan suggested that the states mounted a “strong merits argument” — signaling openness to their broader case.

“Musk has not been nominated by the President nor confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as constitutionally required for officers who exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” Chutkan wrote. “Bypassing this ‘significant structural safeguard of the constitutional scheme,’ Musk has rapidly taken steps to fundamentally reshape the Executive Branch.”

The states “legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” she continued.

Chutkan also warned the administration against falsely downplaying DOGE’s role. Citing the executive order creating the initiative, she appeared dubious of the White House claim that DOGE has no powers over federal personnel. “Defense counsel is reminded of their duty to make truthful representations to the court,” the judge wrote in an ominous footnote.

Elon Musk is currently waging two battles: one in the court of public opinion, to seem as powerful and effective as possible — and one in actual court, premised on making him seem like a mere adviser lacking “significant authority.” Only one descriptor can be true; whichever one judge decide is accurate could determine whether Musk’s role is ultimately deemed constitutional.

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More news to know

• Axios: Trump faces growing DOGE revolt from GOP lawmakers

• CNN: Trump signs executive order aimed at expanding IVF access and reducing costs

• WaPo: High-ranking D.C. federal prosecutor resigns over order to freeze EPA funds

• NBC: USDA accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them

• The Hill: Trump backs House GOP reconciliation bill over Senate version

• Politico: Trump snaps back at Zelenskyy, blaming Ukraine for the war

• Washington Examiner: Trump’s labor pick may need frustrated Democrats’ support without Rand Paul

• NYT: Trump May Name a Woman He Once Pardoned to Be His ‘Pardon Czar’

The day ahead

• President Trump will travel from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to his Trump National Doral Miami golf club in Miami, Florida, where he will spend much of the day. Then, he will attend a tech summit in Miami hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, before returning to the White House. While on Air Force One, he will sign executive orders.

• The Senate will vote on confirmation of former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) to be Administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).

• The House is out for the week.

• The Supreme Court has nothing on its schedule.

In a newsletter last week, I laid out my standard for when I’ll use that label: if the executive branch ever tries to do something, the judicial branch says it can’t, and the executive branch does the thing anyways, openly ignoring the courts and undermining the rule of law.

The piece was passed around a bit (thank you to and for sharing!) and sparked a healthy discussion in the comments section.

I know they say never to venture into an online comments section, but I’ve always been proud that WUTP readers tend to stay pretty civil down there, including when there are disagreements. Even when readers are taking issue with things I’ve written, I generally find the arguments to be fair and well-reasoned.

In this case, there were at least three arguments that different readers brought up — all in a thoughtful and good-faith way — that I think are worth responding to. Each of them brought up examples that basically asked the same question: So, wouldn’t this be a constitutional crisis by your definition?

I happen not to think any of the examples qualify, but I’ve seen them floated in other corners of the internet as well, so I thought it might be helpful to walk through my reasoning in case you’ve seen them mentioned too and were looking for an explanation. Here goes:

#1: Did Biden spark a constitutional crisis by cancelling student loan debt?

Michael A. writes in the comments section:

We have, in fact quite recently, seen a President ignore the Supreme Court’s decision that one of his orders was unconstitutional. Despite President Biden insisting early in his term that he didn’t have the authority to “forgive” federal student loans without a bill passed by Congress, he issued an order doing that very thing — just ahead of the midterm elections. When courts ruled it unconstitutional, he issued a modified, slimmed down version of it.

When that effort was also overturned by Courts, a third version of “student loans without forgiveness” was issued by the Executive branch.

. . . Given this above, which I believe is indisputable, why is a U.S. Presidential Administration acting unconstitutionally a crisis IF Trump does so, but it isn’t a crisis when Biden DID so?

The background here is that President Biden announced in August 2022 that he planned to take executive action to cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt for most borrowers.

His stated justification for doing so was the Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students (HEROES) Act of 2002, which allows the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” provisions of federal student loan law “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

As I’ve written before, if you read the law, it’s fairly clear that the statute’s intent was to benefit members of the military (the law’s titular “heroes”), but regardless, the Biden administration argued that the text was broad enough to allow a much wider cancellation (with Covid-19 as the relevant “national emergency”).

To make a long story short, the Supreme Court did not agree, ruling 6-3 in June 2023 that the Biden administration’s cancellation went beyond the allowable “waiving and modifying” and instead constituted an “exhaustive rewriting of the statute.”

After the ruling, the Biden administration did not carry forward with the program, but did try to relieve student loan debt in several other ways.

• One such effort — aimed at expanding existing loan forgiveness programs for specific groups (such as people who went into public service or people who attended fraudulent schools) — succeeded in cancelling debt for 5 million borrowers.

• Two other attempts — one a new income-driven repayment plan and the other a program to offer relief to a targeted group of borrowers — were blocked by the courts.

Why weren’t these efforts a defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling?

Because the Supreme Court did not rule in Biden v. Nebraska (the case that struck down the initial, most expansive plan) that the Biden administration could not cancel student loan debt. Rather, it ruled that the Biden administration could not cancel student loan debt in that specific way, under the authority of the HEROES Act. The two plans that also ended up being overturned relied on an entirely different law as justification, the Higher Education Act of 1965.

In essence, the court told the administration it could not do something because a certain law didn’t allow it. The administration didn’t do the thing. Then, the administration tried to achieve a smaller version of the same goal by using a different law, to see if that law would allow it. The courts said it couldn’t do that, either, and so the administration didn’t. Nothing about that is unusual.

There’s one more thing to note here, though. Almost every time the Biden administration canceled student loan debt under the existing programs — which no courts ever stopped and which had nothing to do with the actions struck down by the Supreme Court — the president would send tweets like this:

The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt. But they didn’t stop me. I’ve relieved student debt for over 5 million Americans. I’m going to keep going.

That tweet has circulated recently because it was shared by Elon Musk, in an attempt to argue that Biden had ignored an order from the court.

Biden may have had a political incentive to make it sound like he was standing up to a conservative-controlled court to deliver student debt relief — and not simply using pre-existing programs, as was the case. To admit that probably would have made his own actions seem less impressive, but it also would have avoided the impression that he was acting in opposition to the court (an impression he seemed to think would be to his political advantage to leave). It’s hardly a surprise that impression has festered as a result.

My ruling: No constitutional crisis, but Biden’s own sloppy comments are partially to blame for giving people that idea.

#2: Did Trump spark a constitutional crisis in his second term by not enforcing the TikTok ban?

David Sandrich writes in the comments:

Gabe, thank you for your thoughtful piece. In general I agree with your conclusion that calling the current state of affairs a constitutional crisis, per se, is premature.

But didn’t the Trump administration already cross your threshold for such a declaration with its executive order that explicitly contravenes a Supreme Court ruling? I.e. the executive order granting Tik Tok a 75-day extension to comply with the law duly passed by congress, upheld through multiple legal challenges and affirmed by appellate courts and the Supreme Court. And on top of that, by ruling the way it did, the Supreme Court officially rejected then President-Elect Trump’s petition to the court to effect a delay on its ruling and thereby respect constitutional rights by preserving executive authority.

This wasn’t a case whereby an executive simply quietly ignores/slow-walks/seeks work-around to an law clearly upheld by the Supreme Court. This was an explicit challenge. What am I missing here?

During his presidency, Biden signed a law to ban the app TikTok in the U.S. if it wasn’t sold in the next 270 days. TikTok sued, alleging that the law violated the First Amendment; the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional.

Biden signed the law on April 24, 2024, which meant that it went into effect on January 19, 2025. The next day, President Trump took office and signed an executive order, pausing enforcement of the law for at least 75 days. Does that mean he flouted the Supreme Court’s ruling?

No. For one thing, the court’s ruling was about whether or not the law was constitutional — not about whether or not the executive branch was required to do (or not do) something, meaning no action (or non-action) by the president could really be a violation of it.

Still, you might find it alarming that the president is not enforcing a U.S. law after it was upheld by the Supreme Court. You shouldn’t: presidents do this all the time. We live in a big country! It simply isn’t feasible for the executive branch to prosecute every single law-breaker. Every day, the executive branch prioritizes which laws to enforce and which ones not to, something known as prosecutorial discretion.

As an example, somewhat famously, there are currently upwards of 10 million immigrants who reside in the U.S. illegally. This has been the case for the past 20 years; it’s not as if Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden were unaware of the issue. It’s just that it is not logistically possible to detain them all — so they prioritize some undocumented immigrants above others, especially those who have broken other laws. Even Trump’s current administration has said it is doing this, just like his last one did.

Sometimes, presidents actively decline to enforce laws, not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. The Obama administration did this several times, on issues like marijuana and online gambling. The courts are generally OK with this, giving the executive branch broad latitude to decide when to prosecute and when not to.

Does this mean Trump could suddenly not enforce, say, an appropriations law passed by Congress (which details how the government should spend its money)? No. The Supreme Court has ruled in Train v. City of New York that executive discretion does not extend to spending decisions (unless Congress explicitly grants discretion in the law), and Congress further clarified that fact in the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

As far back as Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the executive branch has more latitude in areas that fall within its specific domain (like prosecutions), and less in areas that are shared with other branches (like spending). Chief Justice John Marshall wrote:

Is the act of delivering or withholding a commission [the action that Marbury was litigating] to be considered as a mere political act belonging to the Executive department alone, for the performance of which entire confidence is placed by our Constitution in the Supreme Executive, and for any misconduct respecting which the injured individual has no remedy? That there may be such cases is not to be questioned, but that every act of duty to be performed in any of the great departments of government constitutes such a case is not to be admitted.

Of course, there is still some legal risk in carrying out a behavior prohibited by a law the president has said he won’t enforce, since he could change his mind at any moment, and then you’re screwed. That’s why, for example, Apple and Google still hadn’t restored TikTok to their app stores until last night, when they did so after a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi assured them they face no legal scrutiny.

It’s up to the platforms whether they want to take that risk. But, as I noted in my piece covering the TikTok oral arguments, “How Trump Could End Up Saving TikTok,” even Biden’s own solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged to the justices that this would be within Trump’s power. “I think, as a general matter, of course, the president has enforcement discretion,” she said.

Theoretically speaking, one of TikTok’s competitors could now try to sue the Trump administration, arguing that they must enforce the law. If the Supreme Court were to then order the administration to enforce it (which I don’t think is particularly likely considering the precedent of deferring to the executive on these matters), and the administration refused, then we would be in a constitutional crisis under my definition.

But the court has never ordered the administration to do such a thing; it has merely said that the law is constitutional, without ordering any action from the executive branch for the president to either follow or ignore.

My ruling: No constitutional crisis, but theoretically it could become one if the Supreme Court were to rule that the administration must enforce the law.

#3: Did Trump spark a constitutional crisis in his first term by refusing to restart DACA?

A reader wrote via email:

Something you’ve said in this article is outright incorrect. You mention that Trump followed the Supreme Court’s orders every time [in his first term], but he actually failed to follow them on DACA, and it was a really big deal! Check out the following links. I apologize for the trouble, but I really think you should issue a correction. This story was important at the time, and it's extremely important now.

“DACA,” for those unfamiliar, refers to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era effort to shield from deportation those who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children. (This group is sometimes known as “Dreamers.”)

When Trump took office, his administration moved to repeal DACA in 2017. Legal challenges were brought, and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the Trump administration in 2020. Importantly, though — like the Biden student loans case — the court did not rule that Trump was unable to repeal DACA, full stop. It merely said that the way the administration had gone about doing so was illegal. (Why? Because it had acted via a rushed administrative process that the court found to be “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedures Act, the same statute I wrote about last week.)

“The dispute before the Court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “All parties agree that it may. The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so.” After all, DACA was a program created purely by the executive branch; surely, as long as it followed the right steps, the executive branch could undo it as well.

After the ruling — again, like the Biden administration in the student loans case — Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf issued a memo formally withdrawing the administration’s first attempt to end DACA and outlining a new plan, which involving rejecting all new DACA requests while deciding whether to rescind the program.

An immigrant group then challenged the new memo, by saying that Wolf was illegally serving as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security. Eventually, shortly after Election Day 2020, a federal judge agreed, which made his suspension of DACA invalid. The Trump administration then responded by reinstating DACA.

By then, it was December 2020. Would the Trump administration have reacted differently if it had more than a month left in office? Potentially. But the administration did ultimately restart DACA after trying twice to rescind and being stopped by the courts both times.

I think this back-and-forth brings up the fundamental advantage the executive branch will always have in these sorts of episodes: it can take months for the courts to strike down something, but only days for the executive branch to respond by implementing a new version of the program, which then can takes months to be litigated again. That potential for an endless game of whack-a-mole is, perhaps, a vulnerability in the system (and one we could see Trump trying to take advantage of again in the weeks ahead).

But the big picture here is that, as long as any time the courts say a specific administrative action is not permissible, the administration listens and does not enact it (even if they go on to try a different tactic), we are not in a constitutional crisis.

My ruling: No constitutional crisis, but who knows how the episode would have unfolded if Trump’s term wasn’t running out.

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The Thursday Night Massacre.

From the Associated Press:

Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, and five high-ranking Justice Department officials resigned Thursday after she refused an order to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams — a stunning escalation in a dayslong standoff over the Trump administration prioritizing political aims over criminal culpability.

Sassoon, a Republican who was interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, accused the department of acceding to a “quid pro quo” — dropping the case to ensure Adams’ help with Trump’s immigration agenda — and said she was “confident” the Democratic mayor committed the crimes spelled out in his indictment, and even more. Before the showdown, Sassoon said, prosecutors had been preparing to charge Adams with destroying evidence and instructing others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.

“I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached,” Sassoon wrote Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Wednesday. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter.

The acting deputy U.S. attorney general, former Trump personal lawyer Emil Bove, had ordered on Monday that the Adams case be dropped. He told Sassoon, in a letter accepting her resignation that she was “incapable of fairly and impartially” reviewing the circumstances of the case. Bove placed case prosecutors on administrative leave and said they and Sassoon would be subject to internal investigations.

More news to know

• AP: Trump signs a plan for reciprocal tariffs on US trading partners, ushering in economic uncertainty

• NBC: House GOP panel passes budget blueprint with $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and steep spending reductions

• Politico: Senior Republican senator ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s Ukraine remarks

• MPR: Sen. Tina Smith won’t seek reelection in 2026, putting Minnesota seat up for grabs

• Fox: Judge orders temporary reversal of Trump admin’s freeze on foreign aid

• CBS: U.S. deporting African and Asian migrants to Panama in diplomatic breakthrough

The day ahead

All times Eastern.

• President Trump will sign executive orders in the Oval Office before leaving for Mar-a-Lago.

• The House and Senate are not in session.

• The Supreme Court has nothing on its schedule.

Has any industry benefitted more from Donald Trump’s two presidencies than the Pocket Constitution business?

Just think of all the obscure constitutional provisions that he’s resurrected from irrelevance: the Emoluments Clause. The Impeachment Clause. The Insurrection Clause. Not to mention, if we were to delve deeper into the U.S. Code, statutes like the Impoundment Control Act and the Posse Comitatus Act.

Less than a week after he was re-elected, Trump made a splash by bringing up the Recess Appointments Clause (found in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution), which allows the president to temporarily install appointees without Senate approval when the chamber is on recess.

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments,” Trump wrote in November. (In recent years, the Senate has generally avoided formally recessing in order to prevent presidents from making recess appointments.)

The three candidates who were running for Senate Majority Leader at the time — Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Rick Scott (R-FL), and the eventual winner, John Thune (R-SD) — all quickly responded, rushing to signal their openness to Trump’s plan.

Personally, I think it’s possible that that was the whole point of the exercise: Trump just wanted to make sure that he could make any demand, and all three of the contenders would comply.

If, on the other hand, Trump was genuinely thinking he might need recess appointments to elevate his more controversial nominees — well, then it turns out he was worried over nothing. Today, the last of his most endangered nominees is on track to be confirmed by the Senate without much of a problem.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s approval as Secretary of Health and Human Services will complete a successful three-peat — following the confirmations of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month and of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard yesterday — that seemed far from certain at several points along the way.

The only black mark on Trump’s confirmation record will have been his first pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, whose nomination was withdrawn eight days after it was announced. Frankly, it now seems possible that Gaetz may have been able to get through if only he had waited it out.

To be clear, Trump’s ease in confirming his initial nominees continues a very consistent pattern for the last few decades. Below, I’ve charted the success rates of presidential picks at the beginning of their terms (counting all nominees for Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions until every slot is filled at the start of a new administration).1

As you can see, most recent presidents — like Trump in both his terms — have suffered a sole loss before succeeding in confirming the rest of their top choices. Out of the 123 debut Cabinet-level nominees put forward by Trump’s six predecessors, 115 were confirmed.

But none of them put forward as many divisive picks as Trump. Here, it can be instructive to look back at some of the nominees who didn’t make it through in previous eras.

Of the eight pre-2025 failures recorded above, three (!) withdrew amid scandals involving their employment of undocumented immigrants: Andrew Puzder, Trump’s first-term pick for Labor Secretary (who also faced allegations of sexual abuse); Linda Chavez, George W. Bush’s initial nominee for Labor; and Zoë Baird, Bill Clinton’s first pick to be Attorney General. (Clinton also had an almost-pick for AG, Kimba Wood, who was dropped for the same reason. She isn’t counted above because she was never formally announced for the role.)

Barack Obama’s three debut Cabinet failures — the modern-day high watermark for a new president — were Health and Human Services pick Tom Daschle, who pulled out after it was revealed he owed $140,000 in back taxes, and Commerce nominees Bill Richardson, who was being investigated by a grand jury for pay-to-play allegations, and Judd Gregg, who belatedly decided he didn’t want to cross party lines to join Obama’s team.

Then there’s Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, who withdrew after members of both parties raised concerns about her tweets criticizing senators.

And finally George H.W. Bush’s pick to be Defense Secretary, John Tower — the only one of the group to not just withdraw, but actually be defeated on the Senate floor — who was accused of drunkenness and womanizing.

More than three decades later, Hegseth faced similar — but more pronounced — issues as Tower, including at least one sexual assault allegation, claims that he financially mismanaged several organizations and drank on the job while leading them, and an accusation from his former sister-in-law that he was abusive to his ex-wife.

Kennedy has also been accused of sexual assault, while also facing a suite of other controversies, from his anti-vaccine comments to his suggestion that Covid-19 was genetically engineered to spare Chinese and Jewish people to a bizarre history with animals.

Gabbard, meanwhile, faced questions about her 2017 meeting with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, her promotion of misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, her ties to a fringe religious group, and her defense of leaker Edward Snowden.

The trio makes some of the doomed nominees of the recent past seem downright quaint; indeed, they each went through periods where it seemed like their nominations were in doubt. Trump briefly entertained ditching Hegseth for Ron DeSantis or another candidates for Defense Secretary. Senate GOP vaccine advocates appeared skeptical of Kennedy (as did some pro-life Republicans); defense hawks were none too pleased with Gabbard.

How did all three end up sailing through? Here are some of the key factors:

* Key concessions. GOP senators didn’t let any of the nominees through without exacting a pound of flesh. During their confirmation processes, Hegseth promised to quit drinking and reversed himself on women in the military; Gabbard came out in support of a key surveillance tool she had previously opposed; and Kennedy announced sudden conversions on vaccines and abortion.

* Primary threats. There’s always high pressure on senators to unite behind a new president from their party, but it was especially high this year. GOP activists (from Meghan McCain to Elon Musk) promised to go to war on behalf of Trump’s nominees, besieging Republican senators with calls and promising primary challenges against any who stepped out of line. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), an initial Hegseth skeptic, was the first to face one of these campaigns; the experience was enough to flip her, and seemingly, enough of a warning sign for other Republicans as well.

* JD Vance. Several senators have explicitly credited the VP with helping persuade them to back Trump’s controversial picks. Vance clearly has the trust of his former colleagues; he’ll be a key Capitol Hill emissary to watch in the months ahead.

* A changed Senate. I was curious to see how often senators have voted against Cabinet picks submitted by a new president of their own party in the past.2 The answer? Not often. The record-holder in this area is first-term Donald Trump, especially in his lower-profile nominees. (Each president gets to designate which officials they consider to be “Cabinet-level”: these appointees, like the Director of National Intelligence or the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency don’t lead executive departments, but still get to join Cabinet meetings.)

Why the steep drop-off from Term One to Term Two? Well, one reason might be that half of the Republican senators who were willing to vote against Trump’s picks in 2017 are no longer in office, symbolic of the president’s increasing grip on the party. Then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) accounts for two of the nine votes; then-Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Ben Sasse (R-NE) account for two more. (Sitting Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Rand Paul (R-KY) were the other dissenters.)

According to FiveThirtyEight, less than half of the Republican members of Congress who were in office in 2017 are still there today, partially a sign of normal churn — and partially a sign of a party that Trump has transformed.

Along these lines, I couldn’t help but notice that Gabbard was sworn in under a portrait of Ronald Reagan yesterday. Gabbard and “The Gipper” represent two very different foreign policy philosophies;3 it was hard not to see it as something of a passing of the torch.

* Changing conceptions of advice and consent. One Republican lawmaker who has committed himself to promoting Reaganesque foreign policy in his final years in offie is Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who voted against both Hegseth and Gabbard — making him responsible for two of the four GOP votes against second-term-Trump nominees so far.

I was struck by something McConnell wrote in his statement after the Gabbard vote yesterday: “The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not an option; it is an obligation, and one we cannot pretend to misunderstand. When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent.”

It’s not hard to figure out who McConnell thinks is “pretend[ing] to misunderstand” their “advice and consent” role: his own GOP colleagues, several of whom have said in statements that they are supporting Trump nominees not because of their merits — but because Trump nominated them. “Having won the election decisively, I believe President Trump has earned the right to appoint his own cabinet, absent extraordinary circumstances,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said when announcing his support for Gabbard. “President Trump chose Tulsi Gabbard to be his point person on foreign intelligence,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) added. “I will trust President Trump on his decision and vote for her confirmation.”

Having looked through all the roll call votes on initial Cabinet nominees since George H.W. Bush to make the above charts, it’s striking to see the evolution in how senators view their “advice and consent” responsibilities. Decades ago, it was common for nominees to sail through with bipartisan support: Bill Clinton’s entire first Cabinet was confirmed unanimously. Now, senators have gone in two opposite directions: senators from the opposition are much less likely to support presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, senators from the president’s party — while not necessarily voting at a for or against nominees at a different rate — often don’t even pretend to support the picks they vote for, but explicitly say they’re supporting a confirmation simply out of deference to the president.

* Harry Reid. None of Trump’s most controversial nominees have received more than 60 votes, which was the level of support Cabinet nominees used to need until then-Democratic leader Harry Reid forced a rules change in 2013. It’s interesting to consider what Trump’s Cabinet nominees would look like in a world where that didn’t happen.

Of course, it’s possible that the so-called “nuclear option” would have been invoked anyways by now — although I’m not positive of that. McConnell resisted Trump’s pressure to eliminate the legislative filibuster in his first term (although he did expand Reid’s move with respect to nominees); Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) prevented Democrats from messing with the rule under Biden; and Thune has seemed resistant to fiddling with Senate rules to accelerate Trump’s agenda.

Who knows if the 60-vote standard would still be here if not for Reid, but the Nevada Democrat certainly made it easier.

Just because the Senate is quickly churning through Trump’s Cabinet picks, it doesn’t mean that the confirmation battles are over.

The next fights to watch will be over some of Trump’s more controversial picks for other administration posts, like Pentagon foreign policy pick Elbridge Colby, who has ruffled the feathers of defense hawks; National Counter Terrorism Center Director nominee Joe Kent, who has extremist ties; and Charles Kushner, who Trump tapped to be U.S. ambassador to France despite his sordid past.

Trump has also elevated nominees who failed to be confirmed in his first term — like the aforementioned Andrew Puzder, who Trump has nominated to be ambassador to the European Union — setting up a clean test of how much the Senate GOP has changed in eight years.

Maybe Trump will still need to use recess appointments after all. Or, on second thought, maybe not.

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Reconciliation update

House and Senate Republicans are still at odds over how to advance President Trump’s agenda. The Senate Budget Committee approved a framework Wednesday for a $342 billion package that would focus on boosting defense and border security spending, leaving extending the 2017 tax cuts for another bill.

Meanwhile, the House Budget Committee is set to vote today on a very different blueprint, which would call for $300 billion in new defense and border spending and $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and a $4 trillion increase to the debt ceiling — all in one package.

But, as is often the case with House Republicans, it’s unclear if GOP leaders have enough votes to advance their plan: some members of the House Freedom Caucus are pushing for at least $500 billion in additional spending cuts, as well as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps.

According to Politico, the Trump administration is split on whether to endorse the House or Senate approach: Vice President JD Vance is reportedly among those who wants to split the president’s agenda into two bills, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is pushing for one.

• As I wrote last week: “Republican lawmakers may be loath to disagree with Trump, but they have no problem disagreeing with each other.” The split-screen between Republicans easily approving Trump’s Cabinet nominees while they squabble amongst themselves over legislative process underlines that point perfectly.

More news to know

President Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin spoke over the phone on Wednesday, laying the groundwork for new negotiations over ending the war in Ukraine. Trump signaled plans to meet with Putin in-person, potentially in Saudi Arabia.

• Before the talks kick off, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear that the U.S. views two of Ukraine’s key asks — joining NATO and reclaiming its pre-2014 borders — as “unrealistic.”

A Clinton-appointed federal judge ruled that Trump’s buyout plan for federal workers could proceed, after previously pausing the program while he considered the case. The judge decided that the unions who sued to stop the buyout lacked standing to bring the case.

• The Trump administration said after the ruling that about 75,000 employees had taken the deal, which is no longer available. “The Fork in the Road is Closed,” an email announced to employees.

Eight inspectors general fired last month are suing for their jobs back, citing Trump’s failure to follow a law requiring he give Congress an explanation and 30-day notice for their dismissals.

• In a separate case, the Justice Department signaled its plans to ask the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent that prevents the president from firing members of independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

As Democrats raise concerns about whether Trump will continue following court orders, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that “the real constitutional crisis” is taking place within the judicial branch. She accused judges halting Trump’s orders of “acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced plans to sue the state of New York over its law allowing undocumented migrants to receive driver’s licenses.

X, the social media company owned by White House adviser Elon Musk, agreed to pay Trump around $10 million to settle a lawsuit the president brought over his post-January 6th suspension from the platform (which predated Musk’s ownership of the app).

Deputy Acting Attorney General Emil Bove has been leading the Trump administration’s efforts to purge the Justice Department of officials who investigated January 6th. But he helped investigate January 6th in the months after the attack.

Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, is considering running for re-election as a Republican. Trump’s Justice Department dropped the corruption charges against him earlier this week.

The Senate Ethics Committee has not issued any ethics sanctions against senators or Senate staffers for 18 consecutive years.

The day ahead

President Donald Trump will sign executive orders on tariffs at 1 p.m. before meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India at 4 p.m. Trump and Modi will hold a joint press conference at 5:10 p.m. and have dinner together at 5:40 p.m.

Vice President JD Vance will visit the site of the Dachau concentration camp. He is in Germany to attend the Munich Security Conference, which kicks off tomorrow.

The Senate will vote at 10:30 a.m. to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, followed by a vote to confirm Brooke Rollins as Agriculture Secretary. Then, at 1:45 p.m., the chamber will hold procedural votes advancing the nominations of Howard Lutnick to be Commerce Secretary and Kelly Loeffler to be head of the Small Business Administration.

The House will vote at around 10:30 a.m. on the Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act, which would make undocumented immigrants “inadmissible, deportable, and ineligble for immigration relief (including asylum)” if they are convicted for fleeing by car from U.S. Border Patrol agents within 100 miles of the border. The bill is named for a border agent who died in an ATV accident in 2022 while pursuing migrants who crossed the border illegally.

The House Budget Committee will meet at 10 a.m. to consider the House version of the budget resolution to unlock the reconciliation process.

*All times Eastern.