U.S. President Donald Trump maintains a hostile relationship with expertise. His disdain has been on full display as he dismissed warnings from a majority of economists about implementing widespread tariffs. As a result, he has sent global markets into a tailspin, threatening a deep recession. While surrounded by a few sympathetic economists pushing a “degrowth agenda,” Trump has defied the most respected voices on this issue.
The president’s unorthodox decisions should not come as a surprise. He governs by instinct. “I have a gut,” Trump explained in 2018, “and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” (When asked last week about how he came up with a period of 90 days for the pause on implementing most of his tariffs, Trump answered, “just instinctively.”)
Trump has not made a secret of his deep distrust for experts who spend their time buried in data, analysis, and scholarly literature. His fierce attacks on the university system have revealed how little he respects vital sources of generating new knowledge. His cabinet appointments have generally reflected a disregard for individuals immersed in issue areas with demonstrated capacity to manage large bureaucracies.
And perhaps most consequentially, Trump has made a high-stakes bet on tariffs without a cadre of independent-minded economists surrounding him, creating the real risk of a global economic crisis.
But as with so much else about Trump, what seems unprecedented has historical roots. The president’s decision to pursue a jerry-built tariff structure is a product of the increasingly strained marriage between presidents and experts—a marriage that was consummated in the post-World War II and Cold War eras.
It seems like it was a different world when politicians understood the value of expertise in governance.
The distance that we have traveled is evident when looking back at the formation of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1946. Coming out of the war, many government officials perceived some level of expertise as an asset for economic growth, national security, and safeguarding the nation’s character. The federal government’s scale and scope had expanded dramatically. The new national security apparatus and the United States’ entrance into international alliances meant that Washington would be permanently engaged overseas. After all, the creation of the atomic bomb had erased the insulation from serious threats that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had once provided.
The institutionalization of expertise within the executive branch became an important goal following a legislative struggle that unfolded in 1945. A coalition of congressional liberals, led by Sens. James Murray of Montana and Robert Wagner of New York, pushed legislation that committed the federal government to achieve full employment through macroeconomic policy. By adjusting spending and taxation, the bill promised that Washington would help ensure the highest possible employment levels. As originally proposed, the bill would have required the federal government to publish a national production and employment budget indicating what steps the government needed to take to achieve full employment, from which point the government would establish policies to help achieve those ambitious goals.
While liberal interest groups, including organized labor, mobilized behind the legislation, the proposal encountered fierce opposition from the business community and congressional conservatives, who warned that the legislation would result in a dangerous expansion of the federal government akin to communism.
When the legislation finally passed in 1946, Congress had stripped away some of the boldest components of the Employment Act. However, the bill did establish the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). This body of economists was created with the intention of enhancing the tools that presidents had at their disposal to make sound decisions.
Within the executive branch, there had been a reluctance to embrace this idea, as most presidents tend to fear voices who are too independent. Then-Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson unsuccessfully pushed for an alternative, a body of economists that would be a cabinet-level committee. But Murray and Wagner’s vision won out.
The legislation placed CEA in the Executive Office of the President and charged the body with providing the president with top-level, independent expertise. It outlined a number of major functions that the economists would be responsible for handling, including generating sound economic forecasts and appraising “various programs and activities of the federal government.” The economists would make recommendations based on research rather than political considerations. And the council was composed of nonpartisan economists to prevent presidents from formulating policy in a political echo chamber that shielded them from the difficult risks and trade-offs of potential proposals.
According to the final measure, the president was granted the responsibility of appointing the body’s three members, all of whom would need to be confirmed by the Senate. One of the appointees would be named as the chair. Congress would provide the CEA with adequate funding to recruit professional staff.
President Harry Truman appointed Edwin Nourse from the Brookings Institution as the first chair of the CEA alongside Leon Keyserling—a staffer for Wagner who had crafted most of the legislation—and the economist John D. Clark. Nourse was a respected economist and a former president of the American Economic Association, which had the strong support of business leaders.
The CEA slowly emerged as a trusted body of advisors to presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, who were able to tap into some of the finest minds of the academy to join as staff.
Having put aside his initial concerns, in 1947, Truman praised the CEA in an economic report to Congress. “This Act wisely provided for a Council of Economic Advisers to the President,” Truman said, “who as a result of training, experience, and attainments are exceptionally qualified to analyze and interpret economic developments, to appraise programs and activities of the Government and to formulate and recommend national economic policy.” The CEA’s analysis was instrumental to the economic components of the NSC-68, a policy document that the administration released in 1950 to map out a massive increase in defense spending.
Part of what ultimately gave Truman solace about the council was Keyserling, who emerged as an influential voice, shifting the CEA toward an agenda rooted in Keynesian economics that accepted the realities of deficit spending as a prerequisite to achieving a strong economy. When Nourse, who was more fiscally conservative, resigned from the council in 1949, Truman promoted Keyserling to the position of chairman.
The council solidified its bipartisan standing under President Dwight Eisenhower. The former war hero was also leery of the economists, who he feared would be too liberal in their outlook. There was a sense that Keyserling had become too political in his orientation. Yet Eisenhower also understood the value of expertise. His concerns lessened after appointing a more conservative chair, Arthur Burns, to take over from Keyserling. Burns elevated the standing of the chairman and strengthened ties with the country’s universities.
The bipartisan triumph of the CEA during the Eisenhower administration made sense, given that a belief in expertise was prevalent throughout U.S. culture at the time.
Universities were booming in the 1950s, a source of immense national pride in the so-called American Century. The federal government poured millions of dollars into institutions of higher learning, realizing that research, education, and the strength of the nation went hand in hand. Millions of Americans attended college, often for the first time in their family, through generous government assistance such as the postwar GI Bill of Rights. Classrooms were overflowing when the baby boom brought unprecedented numbers of students into the schools. Many academic disciplines that had formed decades earlier—such as economics, political science, and psychology—flourished and reached new levels of analytical sophistication. Experts were a pronounced presence in public culture, even. In her book The Romance of American Psychology, historian Ellen Herman suggests that psychologists impacted the “texture of public life” in this era.
The tension between balanced analysis and political advocacy was never completely resolved, as historian Michael Bernstein describes in his book A Perilous Progress, but the council was able to do a relatively good job developing a reputation as being a source of sound social scientific advice.
Over the next few decades, the CEA would continue to play a big role in deliberations over some of the most consequential presidential decisions, from Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty to Barack Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009.
As President Jimmy Carter’s CEA chair, Charles Schultze, put it in a 1984 interview with the New York Times, “The council’s job is to be concerned with how efficiently the economy operates. It has no outside clientele to please, unlike the economists in the Labor Department, Agriculture or other agencies, who will argue for their own programs. There’s no place else where the President can regularly get disinterested economic advice.”
As Erwin C. Hargrove and Samuel A Morley —the co-editors of a book on the CEA, The President and the Council of Economic Advisors—argued that year: “The president has a strong incentive to seek good economic advice on the theory that knowledge is to be preferred to ignorance. It does not follow that the president acts on the advice; there may be short-run political reasons not to do so. However, the politics of choice is still enhanced by knowledge. The president should know, and want to know, both the economic and political costs and benefits of alternative choices.”
Since the 1980s, the CEA has struggled to be relevant in a much more contentious environment. Conservative assaults on expertise have been building since then-President Ronald Reagan considered eliminating the council in 1984 following high-profile battles with the CEA’s then-chairman, Martin Feldstein.
Economists in the White House have had to survive in a fractious and fragmented national culture where disinformation, conspiracy theories, and manipulated data have gained a strong hold on the national dialogue. Institutions that house experts have suffered from a similar loss of trust as Congress, presidents, and the press.
Finally, the CEA has had to compete with new sources of expertise within the executive branch, such as the National Economic Council, which President Bill Clinton created through executive order in 1993.
Based on what we have learned thus far, Trump does not make decisions based on independent economic advice. In his second term, the president has purposely surrounded himself with individuals who arrived from outside professional networks of trusted experts. He has only opened the door to his inner circle figures, whom he knew would agree with whatever he had to say.
As economist Paul Krugman noted to the New York Times in an interview in early April, economist Robert Lighthizer—a tough protectionist who is respected by many economists given his deep knowledge—was not invited into Trump’s second administration: “People assumed he would play a big role in this administration, but he was passed over—and almost for sure, that’s because he is independent. He’s his own man. He didn’t come to this out of fealty to Donald Trump. So he might actually say to the king: No, not tariffs on Bangladesh.”
Even with his doctorate from Harvard University, Trump CEA Chairman Stephen Miran is not a traditional CEA chair. In addition to serving as a senior official in the Treasury Department during Trump’s first term, the strong tariff advocate has worked as a senior strategist at a hedge fund and has been intensely political. He donated to Trump-affiliated political action committees and has been an open and vocal critic of the Federal Reserve and former President Joe Biden’s proposals.
As the past two weeks have revealed, there was a good reason that expertise was important to presidents in the second half of the 20th century—a lesson that has been forgotten. The magnitude of the decisions facing presidents and the global ramifications of any single policy choice require sophisticated analysis. The CEA has never been an insurance policy against bad decisions, and many of its advisors have mistakenly lent support to poor choices, but their independent analysis has been an important guide and source of pushback before presidents pull the economic trigger.
Gut instinct is not sufficient for effective governance. Too much is at stake in our interconnected economy, where government decisions have massive effects. When presidents refuse to listen to anyone who makes decisions based on what they learn from researching the data, as opposed to following polls and political experts, then the nation will find itself at risk.
And this is exactly where the United States has landed as we stand on the precipice of a major self-inflicted economic disaster.
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