The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump's First 100 Days: An Increase In Executive Power

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

When running for office, Donald Trump suggested that he "alone could fix" the ills befalling the United States. In his administration's first 100 days, he and his allies have moved quickly to expand the powers of the presidency accordingly.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Sarah McCammon, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Have you or someone you love been confused by the push to make America healthy again? Then you, my friend, are in dire need of our new series. On It's Been A Minute from NPR, we're delving into some of the origins, conspiracy theories and power grabs that have led us to this moment and what it could mean for our health. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. This week on the pod, we're doing something a little different, taking a look at some of the policies and decisions President Trump has made in the first 100 days of his second term.

Today, how the president has used executive power to push through his agenda and reshape the government. Throughout his times in office, Trump has cast himself as being on one side of a battle, a fight to wrest control from unelected bureaucrats and put it in his hands. My administration will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy and we will restore true democracy to America again. The idea of a more powerful president acting unilaterally has been a cornerstone of what's called the unitary executive theory.

In short, it argues that any power undertaken by the executive branch is controlled by the president and the president alone. And since his 2016 run for the White House, Trump has argued he is the one best fit to serve in that kind of expanded role. I alone can fix it. And as the Supreme Court has recently rejected arguments to restrain a president's power. The US Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines ruled that a former president has absolute immunity for his core constitutional powers.

The federal system of checks and balances is being tested. So today, let's talk about presidential power and how Donald Trump is using it to implement his agenda and what Donald Trump is using it to implement his agenda and what role Congress is playing. With me are political correspondent Susan Davis and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hello to both of you. Hey, Tim.

Hey there. Sue, I want to start with you. Broadly this idea of the unitary executive, it isn't new. Where did it come from and how did it get so popular? I mean this is a theory that dates back to literally the founding of the Republic. It was featured in the Federalist Papers and the short of it is that it was always an argument that if you wanted to have a quote energetic executive that that executive needed to be able to command the will of the entirety of the executive branch. But as the country has evolved and the bureaucracy

has expanded and the government has expanded, the agencies and the oversight of that government, I think supporters of this would say that the president has lost some of that power. And Trump's trying to take it back. And for a long time, this would have been referred to as sort of a conservative fringe legal theory. But it has very much moved into the mainstream and you're seeing it play out in real time. I think probably the best example of it is the president's efforts to fire people at agencies who have been appointed and approved by the Senate and are supposed to serve independent of the White House. And the White House is saying, no, if the president is going to be held accountable for what the agencies do and what their decisions

are, he should be able to hire and fire at will. Sue, you talk about independent agencies. It might be an alphabet soup, but tell us a few of them. Sure. I think two good examples that most people would be aware of is the Federal Election Commission. It's supposed to be bipartisan and those commissioners are approved by the Senate. Donald Trump has attempted to fire the sitting chair,

Ellen Weintraub, that is one of the legal challenges. Another good example is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is similar structure to the FEC, independent commissioners approved by the Senate. And these agencies are designed to be independent because I think the FEC highlights the paradox here in that how can an agency that oversees election law and

campaign law be seen as a fair and equitable arbiter of that law if it's controlled by one of the people that is ultimately on the ballot? And I don't think that that is something that aligns with what most modern Americans would want from their government. Do you have other examples of how the president has used broader executive power to his advantage? I mean, I think everything Trump has done has almost been an effort to expand presidential power. And I would say part of the efforts he's taken, the firings, trying to close certain agencies and departments of government, we should note these are all being challenged in the judiciary

through the courts. There is certainly attempts to put a check on this power. And we don't know the answer to this question of how much can you expand executive power in modern day America. We're going to find out that answer over the course of Trump's presidency. But I would also point to his executive actions. Trump has issued 130 executive orders. Now we have talked about executive orders for all modern presidents. They're not a new concept. But Trump is like an accelerant. If you compare his 130 executive orders in the entirety of the Biden administration, President Biden issued 162 executive orders

in four years. Trump's going to pass that pretty soon in just a matter of months. I would also point to, and we'll talk about this more, the executive branch has also been quite happy to impede on what is constitutionally, traditionally, a lot of the prerogatives of the legislative branch of Congress. You could argue that the entire Department of Government efficiency, the DOGE effort, infringes on congressional prerogative to set and approve spending for the federal government. And also, you know, traditionally when Congress appropriates money for things, the president doesn't really have the power to not implement it. Now, there's, of course, always exceptions

to that throughout history. But broadly speaking, Congress is supposed to set the spending priorities for the government. And Trump seems pretty willing to either ignore it or defy it. You know, it's interesting Sue mentions the history of the unitary executive and what Trump is doing to sort of run over these other co-equal branches of government when it comes to the legislative and judicial branches. You know, the taking back the power was supposed to be the take back the power for the executive branch, not necessarily the executive for the country, but he's tried to go much broader than that. Yeah. So the president will argue, hey, I won. The people voted for change and I'm entitled to make those changes quickly and he is moving very quickly. Does he have a point, even if

at this moment, public opinion seems to be turning against some of the things that he's doing? Well, I mean, this wasn't like an 80-20 election. Yeah. You know, I mean, this wasn't even a 60-40 election. This wasn't even a 55-45 election. This was a very, very close election with Trump not even reaching 50% of the popular vote overall.

Sure, he got a large electoral vote majority, but that often happens with all of these presidential elections that we've seen recently where most of the, if not all of the swing states tip in one direction. Trump has sort of used that as a way to try to accelerate his power as the executive and talk about, you know, his quote unquote mandate, which he's mentioned many times, presidents always seem to over read those mandates. What did people really vote for? Did everyone vote for every single agenda item that President Trump is putting forward? No, certainly you could make the argument that his base and Republicans overall, like what he's doing certainly, but the others who crossed over, and I've said this before, it was about prices

and the economy. And what we've seen with his approval ratings is sort of an inverse of his first term, where his approval ratings overall are actually higher than his approval ratings on the economy. And that was generally the thing that you could argue was the biggest reason for him winning in the first place was to try to bring prices down. And yet his tariffs are likely to do the opposite experts say. How different is Trump's approach to the presidency this time than it was in his first term? Well, he has way more control over all of these branches. He's got the House, he's

got the Senate, he's got, you know, a six, three conservative majority on the Supreme Court because of three conservative justices that he was able to appoint in his first term. So the political landscape, the power in Washington landscape has shifted significantly since he first came to power in 2017. You know, there's a famous line from former president Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he said, quote, whatever else they may say about me, I do understand power. I know where to look for it. I know how to find it. I know how to use it. And I think the same thing could be said of Donald Trump. He knows what power is and he knows how to use it. And I think

he benefits, um, atmospherically from unitary control of Washington right now, right? It helps that he has a Republican controlled Congress that isn't trying to stand in the way of the president. I think Donald Trump looks at the six,3 Supreme Court and thinks, hey, you know, I might not win them all, but I got a good shot. And I think he is benefiting from the extremes of political polarization. This is an effect of that, where the party, there isn't much ideological diversity in either party now. And a lot of party litmus tests are loyalty to the president.

I think it's more acute in the Republican Party. So I think Donald Trump is more powerful in this moment, especially compared to his first term, because there are fewer forces within his own party willing to be that check. All right, we're going to take a quick break and we will have more in a moment. This message comes from NPR sponsor Air Canada. Ready for your next adventure? How about taking in views upon views in Athens, browsing mouthwatering night markets in Bangkok, or dancing to Carnival in the Caribbean? With amazing beach breaks, city breaks, and bucket list trips to choose from, Air Canada

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They're all smart, don't worry about it. Planet Money from NPR. We go to the story and take you along with us wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And Sue, I do want to talk about the other branches of government here. Congress has seemed to be increasingly okay with presidents taking more and more of their power. You know, take the current fight over tariffs, for instance, or all of these spending cuts that Congress never approved. Why is

Congress allowing this to happen? Yeah, and I think it's important to note here that this isn't something that's a new trend. There has, over the decades, been certain areas where Congress has been more and more willing to let the president take action. I think war powers is a very good example of that. I also think that when it's your president, your party in control of the White House, the attempts to legislate through executive action, you hear a lot less complaints about that from within their own party on Capitol Hill. So Donald Trump, I often describe him as like an accelerant on a lot of these trends. And I think he benefits right now. As I said, Republicans control both the House and

the Senate, and he has allies there. You know, Donald Trump has remade this party, and a lot of the litmus tests for being a modern-day elected official in the Republican Party is loyalty to Donald Trump. Yeah. And as a result though, you know, there are basic functions of Congress like funding the government and deciding, you know, the power of the purse is an Article One power and Congress is kind of just letting him do it. Yeah. And I talked to Sarah Binder about this. She's someone that you've probably heard on NPR over the years. She's a George Washington University professor and a longtime scholar at the Brookings Institution, which is a centrist think tank here in DC. And she's been studying

Congress for decades. And she said to me, what's happening here with the president trying to attempt to meddle in this spending powers of Congress is what she said, in her words, really existential. It's really hard to get around the single most important power that Congress has as power of the purse. And if the parties can't be sure that the administration is going to abide by those pots of money that they sit into statute, that they put right in the law,

then the jig is up, right? And look, you already saw Republicans agree to fund the rest of the fiscal year on last year's spending agreements, something that they never like to do for an entire year. And there's a real question over whether Congress can approve next year's 12 appropriation bills on time. And as Binder notes, there's this question of, look, even if Congress signs these things into law, we're now at a point where you don't have a ton of confidence that the president's going to honor it.

And stepping back, I mean, I feel like a broken record a little bit on this, but this is so much to do with polarization. I mean, the fact that fewer and fewer seats are swing seats, swing districts, you have fewer members of Congress who are willing to speak out because they fear Donald Trump's political power on the right. If you're somebody in a district that went for Donald Trump, even a little bit, you know, you're going to have potentially headwinds if Trump decides to oppose you, if you stick your neck out and you're going to have a primary opponent.

And you know, if you had more people who were in more swing districts, you would have more people speaking out. But right now, they fear Donald Trump. That's correct. Like there is a genuine sense among Republicans that speaking out against the president isn't going to win you any favors. But there has also been a ton of anecdotal reporting that there is some pushback starting here. People are working back channels to say, Hey, don't cut that funding in my state. Hey, hey, hey, the that biomedical research is facility is not one I want you to touch. And that, I think that that tension is only going to accelerate as we look to like what's to come in Trump's second term. And I would also say like the broader political picture

here is one that I spoke to Kevin Kosar about. He's also a congressional scholar. He's with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. And because pod game respects pod game, he also has a podcast about Congress called Understanding Congress. And he said, look, like Trump is trying to do so much so fast because he's already got his eye on the midterms. I do feel like the administration and congressional Republicans to a degree really are operating within a two-year window. And so the amount of deference that legislators are showing is to some degree like we just have to do this to see if we can rack up as many wins as possible because those midterms are probably not going to go our way. And I think where they're getting particularly anxious is that by being deferential, it leads to presidential unilateralism

that can be a bit tone deaf. And look, because if you look at what is happening in real time, these programs and money that Doge is cutting, a lot of this is affecting programs that are popular. And when your constituents are angry, they're not calling Doge, they are calling their member of Congress.

So the risk for the legislative branch here is that you're allowing the executive branch to wreak all this havoc without your input, but yet you're going to be affected by the blowback of their actions. No, just a couple of points. I mean, first of all, you know, a lot of this comes down to how does it affect me? I feel like that's a very American way to think, it seems like. How does it affect me, my backyard? NIMBY is a thing for a reason, not in my backyard. And you're seeing that as these ideological cuts take place, you're seeing more and more members of Congress on the right saying, whoa, pump the brakes here.

It didn't mean for you to cut the thing that I like in my district. And look, about 100 days in, Donald Trump is not that popular and neither is Elon Musk. Public polling would suggest that the president's approval on any number of issues is heading south and it's one thing to align with the president in a midterm when he's popular. But the less popular Donald Trump gets, you know, voters take out their anger in one place and that's in Congress in the midterms. I'm just thinking about all of these lawmakers going quietly to the White House, to the president, to the agencies and saying, please don't cut this thing that's important in my district.

Doesn't that just give President Trump even more power? It's like a line item veto almost. Right. And we've seen him do that with tariffs, right? Being able to have these countries sort of shaken down to come back to him to make a deal. And he says, okay, you know, I'm open for business. And I think that he thinks that way, certainly about members of Congress, too. You want that thing. I certainly hope that it doesn't, you know, that nothing, nothing ever happens to it, right? You want that weather station in your in your district? Well, you know, let's talk. He's always the guy who's looking to make a deal, but not looking to make a deal to, you know, concede any power, but to accumulate more of his own. So just big picture before we go. Is the balance of power something that is like a genie that's

hard to get back into the bottle? Like once the co equal branches of government aren't so equal anymore? is that it? Does the president always have this much power? I mean, once things change, it's hard to go back to the way things were. And when I talked to Sarah Binder about this, she used a line that former Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama used when the Senate changed the filibuster rules. And he said, it's kind of like squeezing all the toothpaste out of the tube. You can try to get it back in, but it's never

going to look like it was before. And I think that's true here. I think the thing that I'm not entirely certain about is, how do you put the value judgment on that? Is that good? Is it bad? Is it just change? Is it just is?

And I think that when I asked Sarah Binder that question, she said, look, the thing that's not good about it is that a dysfunctional government is not as capable of helping people solve problems. And a country full of people without solved problems who are angry is not a good thing, right? So I think there's a lot to be seen of what comes out of the Trump administration. Obviously, it's very early in. But like, look, he came in kicking the doors down.

And I think at least through the midterm elections, that deference is going to continue. The two things, obviously, I noted the appropriations process. That is a huge pressure test on the Republican Party. The other one I would say that we're going to get increasingly focused on is the Republican Party's ability

to pass Donald Trump's tax cut bill. That bill is in a precarious position on Capitol Hill. It's gonna be incredibly difficult to get through the House and Senate. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune hasn't had a bad day yet, right? Like he's new in the job. So far, it's all been happy days with the White House. He's helped all of his nominations basically sail through the Senate. He's gonna have to strong arm one of the most expensive and complicated pieces of legislation, certainly in Trump's era, through the Senate. And if that can be done, how it gets done is probably the biggest

political pressure clash in Washington this year. All right, let's leave it there for today. Tomorrow on the pod, the president's economic policies. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.