The Pentagon barred the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from making an oversight visit to a military spy agency.
Armed forces off the coast of Venezuela began a military campaign against alleged members of a drug cartel without any authorization from Congress, and without notifying key members.
The White House informed Congress it planned to use a rare maneuver to skirt a vote and cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding that lawmakers had already approved, the latest escalation of its campaign to undercut the legislative branch’s spending powers.
And just a month after senators had confirmed her, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control. He also put forward changes that would effectively restrict access to Covid-19 vaccines, after pledging to senators during his own confirmation hearings that he would not make it more difficult.
The Trump administration continues to erode the power of Congress, trampling on its constitutional prerogatives in ways large and small. Through it all, Republicans in charge have mostly shrugged — and in some cases, outright applauded — as their powers, once jealously guarded, diminish in ways that will be difficult to reverse.
In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have looked on passively as the president has fired a litany of agency leaders whom senators worked for weeks to confirm, from the C.D.C. to the Internal Revenue Service to the Federal Reserve.
And they have shown little appetite for challenging the administration, even as a few have expressed occasional displeasure about the consequences of their decisions earlier this year to swallow their reservations about some of his nominees and confirm them.
“We have confirmed a vaccine denier,” Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, lamented during a hearing last week featuring Mr. Kennedy. “On tariffs, we’ve given up our constitutional responsibility. On appropriations, we’re bending the knee to an administration that is rescinding and deciding what to spend and what not to spend, despite the way our law, in a bipartisan way, was passed.”
“We cannot cede power,” Mr. Welch added. “There are consequences.”
For nearly a century, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have sought to amass more power, particularly to conduct foreign policy and military operations, and with a few exceptions, succeeded in chipping away at congressional influence. What is different now is the degree of disdain Mr. Trump has shown for Congress — and the willingness of G.O.P. leaders to defer to him even when it means undercutting their coequal branch of government.
“That is the big story here — not that a president is trying to push the bounds of their authority, because our system was designed with that in mind,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview. “The true story is that Republicans in Congress have capitulated and are not pushing back to assert authority.”
Republicans largely reject the idea that they have ceded congressional powers of oversight and spending to the White House. They argue that Mr. Trump is wielding his executive authority appropriately to bring a vast federal bureaucracy to heel, and pointed to the testy hearing featuring Mr. Kennedy as proof that they are willing to scrutinize the administration’s actions.
But so far, their most tangible response has come in the form of mild protests from a few Republicans.
When Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, expressed unhappiness after the spate of agency firings, he cited procedural objections: “We confirm these people, we go through a lot of work to get them confirmed, and they’re in office a month?” he asked.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican and an orthopedic surgeon, raised eyebrows when he told Mr. Kennedy at last week’s hearing that he had “grown deeply concerned” about his handling of vaccines, after reminding the secretary that he had “promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines” during his confirmation hearings.
But Republicans have yet to announce any oversight hearings on the matter.
They also have not scheduled any action to block the Trump administration from its latest move to unilaterally claw back money that has already been appropriated just weeks before the end of the fiscal year.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, called the proposal a “clear violation of the law,” and has been working with top Senate Democrats to add new safeguards to next year’s spending bills that would ensure the Trump administration allocates federal dollars as lawmakers intend.
“Congress alone bears the constitutional responsibility for funding our government,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said this week. “And any effort to claw back resources outside of the appropriations process undermines that responsibility.”
But party leaders appear unlikely to intercede to reject the effort.
Republicans also have been remarkably quiet as the Trump administration seeks to circumvent oversight on issues of national security and intelligence, traditionally an area where Congress’s role has been seen as sacrosanct.
While it has been generations since Congress used its formal power to declare war, it did authorize both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, albeit with broad laws that would end up allowing presidents of both parties to exercise military might in ways lawmakers might not have anticipated.
The campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels announced last week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, is not covered by any congressional authorization. While the Trump administration did not offer any legal justification, experts said that in the absence of any act of Congress, the military action could only be justified under a legal theory that the president has broad authority to use the military as he sees fit.
“There’s absolutely no question the president doesn’t have the power to take airstrikes on boats outside us, waters with no authorization of war,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said. “This president believes he’s above the law. He doesn’t believe the law applies to him. He doesn’t believe the Constitution applies to him, and if we act like that’s normal, then we just encourage the continued illegal constitutional behavior.”
The failure to inform Congress about its attack on a Venezuelan boat this week, lawmakers said, was part of a pattern by the Trump administration of ignoring requirements to inform lawmakers and withholding information about national security matters that other presidents would have shared.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the first Trump administration had failed to notify Congress of a risky military incursion into North Korea to plant a listening device in 2019. Only under the Biden administration were key members of Congress told of the secret mission that led to the death of several North Koreans but did not achieve its goal.
“There is just no situation in which an intelligence operation, a special operation, of this magnitude, whether it is successful or not successful, should be conducted without Congress knowing about it,” said Mr. Crow, who requested a briefing on the operation after the Times story was published. “North Korea is a dangerous and volatile regime. The idea that you are going to just send in a military operation to a country like that without involving the United States Congress is beyond absurd.”
Members of Congress have complained the withholding of information has continued, and grown worse, during Mr. Trump’s second term. Lawmakers who sit on the congressional intelligence committees have been alarmed that the Trump administration is withholding classified assessments of the state of Iran’s nuclear program that would have been shared with them in the past.
Given that American spy agencies operate in secret, denying the public knowledge of either their covert operations or their analytic assessments of U.S. adversaries, congressional oversight is effectively the only way to hold intelligence agencies accountable.
But this week, the Pentagon announced it would block a visit by Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency after Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer who holds no official role in the Trump administration, criticized the planned visit.
Defense officials said they would only allow bipartisan visits to military intelligence facilities, a requirement members of Congress said had never been in place before. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the intelligence panel, lodged no public protest.
The curbs on congressional oversight come during an unusual purge of seasoned intelligence officers, from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the top analyst at the N.G.A., which Mr. Warner was blocked from visiting.
“Is congressional oversight dead?” Mr. Warner asked afterward, wondering aloud how independent intelligence assessments would be made if lawmakers could not have access to the agencies.
“Where does this end?” Mr. Warner went on. “If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”
The Trump administration also has dismantled government agencies and offices created by Congress. The elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw huge amounts of foreign aid, received a huge amount of attention, damaging U.S. influence around the world and gutting aid programs worldwide. But it has also taken out smaller operations.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, announced that the Foreign Malign Influence Center would be shrunk and folded into another office. The move all but eliminated a center created by Congress to counter election interference efforts, and an office that took a big role during the 2020 presidential campaign, warning about Russian propaganda.
The cuts prompted an angry letter this week from Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the House’s China committee, who argued that the Trump administration was stripping away “the constitutional guardrails” that America has relied on for 250 years.
“The founders created a system grounded in checks and balances to ensure that no one branch of government becomes too powerful,” he said. “That premise is being turned on its head by the Trump administration, which seems determined to create an all-powerful executive branch, unchecked by Congress or even the courts.”
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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