Many Republicans in Congress loved what they were seeing: a leader willing to carve out waste and provide real scrutiny of a federal bureaucracy that has become too big, too liberal and too unaccountable.
In the absence of a scalpel, they’ll take a wrecking ball. An explosion has rocked the federal government, in the form of Elon Musk.
In reality, the pressure has been building for decades. Over the past generation, Congress has grown too distracted, too ineffectual or too lazy to hold federal agencies accountable. That has created a political opening for President Trump to seize control of the federal bureaucracy, thoughtlessly and indiscriminately hacking agencies and their work forces. While congressional Republicans may be cheering those efforts now, they could come to regret them once they realize the cost to their own power. Some are already waking up to it.
Congress has, over time, ceded significant authority to the executive, Republicans and Democrats alike. There are all sorts of ways it does this. When an issue is deemed too complicated or fluid to regulate by statute, members write laws that defer to federal agencies on the details, providing those agencies vast power. In some cases, lawmakers have also granted presidents open-ended emergency authority that is ripe for abuse, like granting the power to levy new tariffs and execute military operations, or those used during the pandemic. Once granted, these powers are hard to take away.
Congress controls the power of the purse, but that is not just about spending money; it’s also about outlining what government programs exist and what they are tasked with doing. This is the authorization power, and it’s what allows Congress to get under the hood and set its own priorities. This authorizing authority is a primary muscle that Congress has allowed to atrophy over time.
In most cases, Congress at some point authorized existing government agencies and programs. Some are authorized permanently, but many are for a specific period of time, with Congress obligated to periodically revisit the authorization. That process has allowed Congress to hold agencies accountable and to regularly provide direction in law for how the agencies should operate.
In a few instances, such as with the Department of Defense, Congress has kept up routine authorizations. But increasingly, it has let authorizations for vast expanses of the government lapse, because members are either unwilling to invest the time or unable to muster the votes for congressional authorizations.
The brouhaha over U.S.A.I.D. is a perfect example. The Trump administration is right to want to dig deeper into the agency’s $40 billion budget, investigating whether it’s going to worthy causes. All these years, someone should have been closely regulating how taxpayer dollars were flowing around the world and providing clear guidance in law about how those dollars should be used. That someone is Congress. The problem is that there hasn’t been a full congressional reauthorization of the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. in more than two decades.
Decades ago, Congress generally would not provide funding for any program that was not authorized. Over time, though, as authorizations lapsed, the appropriations committees in the House and Senate have increasingly allowed funds to flow to expired programs, including U.S.A.I.D. In most cases, under House rules, spending money on a program that is not authorized is not permitted. But this restriction is now routinely waived.
The Congressional Budget Office tracks the number of expired authorizations that receive money, and it reported last year that there were 1,256 of them, totaling $516 billion.
The failure of Congress to assert itself makes it easier for some members of Congress to support the plundering of an agency. They have no skin the game. Had members of the Foreign Affairs Committees passed a full reauthorization of U.S.A.I.D. in recent years, they would have a degree of ownership and a need to defend the direction Congress had provided. The absence of an authorization makes it easier for Mr. Musk and his allies to make unchecked claims about how an agency operates.
If the administration follows through on its plans to cut the Defense Department’s budget, which Congress painstakingly reauthorizes every year, there might be a significant reaction from members of the Armed Services committees.
The shiny objects in DOGE’s grasp — such as newspaper subscriptions and an overseas musical festival — are easy to lambaste. Meaningful reform of agencies is not so flashy — which is how we’ve reached this point.
As it turns out, providing oversight is hard, plodding work. It requires intense study, pulling in experts and questioning agency leaders. It requires digging through reports from the Government Accountability Office and an agency inspector general, both of which help to identify waste, fraud and programmatic failures. Today, going on television or social media to say something outrageous provides more political value than passing an agency reauthorization bill. There is no reward for doing the heavy labor.
Of course, party leadership would struggle to pass many authorization bills. Voting to authorize the existence of, say, the Department of Justice (last done in 2005) would be seen as taking ownership of everything the department does, and for many members, the easiest course is to look the other way. Committee chairs with jurisdiction over specific agencies don’t even bother producing regular authorizing laws.
Like any executive, Mr. Trump is happy to take as much power from Congress as he can. When the administration fired a bunch of inspectors general in January, in violation of a law requiring congressional notification, it wasn’t just trying to skirt accountability. It was taking away yet another tool Congress uses, or should use, to understand where agencies and programs aren’t working and reauthorize them in a way that fixes problems.
Whether it has gotten too lazy or too distracted, Congress hasn’t wanted to do the work of checking the executive branch. Democrats are not immune to this criticism. Neither President Barack Obama’s whole-cloth creation of programs to protect undocumented people nor President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan drew much howling about overreach from congressional Democrats. Both parties are happy to see a president exceed authority when they agree with the president’s actions.
But congressional leaders have occasionally cried foul. In 2014, John Boehner, the House speaker for whom I worked, took President Obama to court for spending funds that were not authorized by Congress. The case was an important effort to assert authority, and the result preserved the House’s standing to sue for overreach.
DOGE’s actions thus far may not be quite right for a similar suit, but some members of Congress are already showing signs of wariness about Mr. Musk’s team intruding on programs they care about.
As a start, they could insist on providing greater direction for agencies when Congress must act next month to fund the government. Ultimately, taking real control will require congressional committees to invest time, effort and political capital in authorizing laws for the programs they oversee.
If members continue to stand by as DOGE plunges deeper into the federal bureaucracy, though, Congress would be sending a clear message to future presidents, and perhaps even the courts, that the executive need not worry about congressional authority.
At its essence, politics is about power: accumulating it, spending it. The more Congress gives away today, the weaker the institution and its members become tomorrow. Some day soon, an equally activist Democrat could become president, and Republicans could regret further enabling executive power grabs.
Reorienting the balance of power won’t come quickly or easily, but Congress can start by standing up for itself. Part of the reason Mr. Musk is dominating the country’s attention is because he’s taking action. Congress can, too. All it takes is hard work and political will.
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