Congress Is Surrendering Its Last Real Power
"The legislature is no longer even pretending to be a co-equal branch of government.
This hasn’t been a good year for Congressional authority. Consider Congress’ craven vote to claw back some $9 billion of funding it had previously allocated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. That quiet move tells you a lot about how institutional power works in Washington — especially given some of the bigger headlines of the last seven months.
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What has remained for Congress — until now, at least — has been the power of the purse. Because Congress decides what money to spend and what to spend it on, Congress has retained the capacity to influence the direction of executive branch priorities. This power survived even the first Trump administration. Remember when Trump wanted to build a border wall with Mexico using funds Congress hadn’t appropriated for that purpose? That plan came to grief because, well, the president isn’t supposed to be able to spend without Congressional approval.
Over the last six months, that’s changed. It now looks like we may be entering a new historical era in the decline of congressional power. It started with DOGE — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The legal debate over the DOGE cuts was whether the executive branch could fire government employees whose jobs are provided for by congressional appropriation, and whether whole agencies can be shuttered purely on presidential say-so. This kind of priority-setting is at the core of the constitutional and historical structure of congressional authority. The basic legal reason so many lower courts issued orders blocking the DOGE firings and closings was that the president was acting not only without the authority of Congress, but against Congress’s expressed policies as identified by congressional appropriation.
The Supreme Court’s reversal of these lower court orders has come almost entirely without comment or explanation from the conservative majority. The liberal dissenters, however, have named the stakes very clearly: the separation of powers. This is James Madison’s concept, taught to generations as basic civics, that says each branch of government is designed to check and balance the others.
Instead of upholding that principle, the conservative majority has embraced the ideology of the “unitary executive” — a once-fringe, now dominant conservative theory that insists the president must have total control over the whole executive branch. For nearly half a century, some conservative legal scholars have been arguing that the president should be able to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason he wants. Trump, the man who got famous on the phrase “You’re fired,” came along at the right moment to take advantage of this jurisprudential trend.
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The combination of Trump’s aggressive expansion of executive power and the Supreme Court’s acquiescence would be enough on its own to count as historically significant. But it’s Congress’s own apparent lack of interest in defending itself that tips the scales in favor of real historical change. The rescission bill amounts to a tacit recognition that if the president doesn’t want to spend money allocated, Congress has no reason to insist that he do so.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-27/the-us-congress-is-surrendering-its-last-real-power?srnd=homepage-americas
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