This brief commentary will not be the first word spoken on the regrettable empowerment of the executive branch at the expense of the legislative, and it certainly won’t be the last, nor the most impactful. But it is worth observing that for all of the complaints about President-elect Trump’s first round of executive appointments (and I have myself added my concerns), one thing is clear: the increasing concern over presidential appointments expressed mostly by the Left reveals a larger, often unacknowledged problem—the outsized power the executive branch now wields. This power is not the result of some malevolent plot but rather the slow, cumulative consequence of a Congress that has, for generations, chosen to outsource its legislative responsibilities to the president. Members of Congress, long more interested in securing re-election and raising campaign funds than in performing the hard work of governance, have abdicated their duty to set policy. Instead, they have handed that task over to the executive branch. And yet, when the judiciary—a far less empowered branch—recently curtailed a small fraction of that executive authority, Democrats screamed bloody murder, as though the world were coming to an end.
It’s worth pausing to consider this irony. The very people who decry the expansion of executive power seem to forget that their own behavior over decades has been complicit in creating it. The centralization of policymaking in the White House did not arise out of necessity or constitutional design; it arose out of the preference of individual congressmen for the easy path: delegating hard decisions to the president. In exchange for ceding their power, members of Congress are freed from the messy business of compromise and deliberation, able to spend more time fundraising and less time legislating.
In this sense, the executive branch’s power is not just an aberration of modern governance but the result of strategic neglect. From the New Deal era onward, Congress has been increasingly content to pass broad laws—vague, open-ended frameworks that leave critical decisions about implementation up to the executive agencies. This has allowed presidents to expand their influence, while Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has turned a blind eye to the erosion of its own authority. The result? A bureaucracy that is empowered to make decisions in areas ranging from environmental regulation to healthcare, and—perhaps most troubling—a cadre of unelected, unaccountable officials whose influence extends far beyond the elected representatives of the people.
The rise of executive power is not merely a theoretical issue but one with concrete implications for American democracy. At the heart of the constitutional design was the idea that policy decisions should be made by representatives of the people. Congress was supposed to be the center of policymaking, not the executive. The president’s role, though significant, was meant to be more circumscribed—focused on enforcing the laws passed by Congress, rather than inventing policy through executive orders and administrative rulemaking. But when Congress steps aside from its responsibilities, the executive branch steps forward, and the system becomes distorted.
This brings us to the curious case of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the Supreme Court decision that limited the ability of courts to second-guess administrative agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes. In striking down the broad application of Chevron deference, the Court did not undermine executive power so much as it pushed back against the unchecked authority of unelected bureaucrats. Yet this modest move was greeted with fury by Democrats, who have spent the past several decades championing the expansion of the administrative state in the name of “rule by experts.” Suddenly, the move toward limiting the president’s power to create policy was framed as an existential threat to democracy itself, because policy would be slightly more influenced by the democratic process.
So here’s the fundamental question: Do we want to be governed by elected representatives in Congress, or do we want to be governed by bureaucrats—many of whom are appointed by the president, but none of whom are directly accountable to the electorate? If Congress cannot summon the political will to do its job, then it is inevitable that the executive branch will step into the vacuum. But this trend raises a deep contradiction: If we believe in democracy, we must believe that policy should be made by elected officials. That is the crux of the issue. It is not just that the executive branch has too much power—it is that Congress has, for too long, been willing to let it have it.
If we wish to preserve the principle of self-government, then we must insist on a return to a system where the people’s elected representatives, not unelected bureaucrats, shape the policies that govern our lives. Congress must stop outsourcing its responsibility to the president, and the courts must continue to act as a check on executive overreach. Only then can we hope to restore a balance of power that truly reflects the democratic ideals upon which this nation was founded.
