President Donald Trump’s first nine months in office have fundamentally changed how the executive branch—and the federal government as a whole—operates. The Wilsonian and Rooseveltian model of federal regulatory agencies staffed by experts and nonpartisan civil servants who act in the public interest as defined by Congress is in shambles.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has stocked the federal vaccine advisory committee with anti-vaccine activists and spread medical misinformation. Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is rescinding the scientific findings that allow federal officials to regulate carbon emissions and fight climate change. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from financial frauds and scams, is essentially moribund.
Even agencies that were supposed to be insulated from day-to-day political pressure are under siege. Trump, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has ousted Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and other independent agencies despite congressional protections against their removal. He is currently seeking to oust a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on pretextual grounds, potentially giving him indirect control over the basic levers of American monetary policy.
Amidst this deregulatory campaign, the White House is still bending civil society and the private sector to its will. Trump used threats to cut off federal funding to coerce universities into supporting his ideological goals. He coerced companies like Nippon Steel and NVIDIA into giving the federal government a direct role in their inner workings. And he used the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory power to harass mainstream media organizations into ideological compliance.
This onslaught is a devastating turn of events for Americans who believe in good governance and the public interest. The reverberations—and the damage—will be felt for decades. At the same time, the Trump administration’s aggressive use of executive power provides a new road map for progressive policymaking whenever it happens that Democrats retake the White House.
This article, for clarity’s sake, rests on a few assumptions. It is January 20, 2029, and a generic Democratic president has just taken the oath of office. They are joined by the exact majorities that Trump had in 2024: 220 seats in the House and 53 seats in the Senate. The Supreme Court remains unchanged with six conservative justices and three liberal justices—a likely prospect, given who would select the replacements of the court’s eldest members.
This allows us to assume that the next Democratic president will face a similar playing field. This includes a highly deferential legislative branch—one that will confirm all (or almost all) of their nominees, prevent government shutdowns through regular funding measures, and decline to use certain congressional powers to reverse executive actions—and a federal judiciary that is highly deferential to executive power. (Or at least this particular executive’s power.)
The most important thing the next Democratic president can do is simply turn the lights back on. Reversing Trump’s executive orders and regulatory changes would be the new administration’s number-one priority. Staffing agencies with political appointees who actually believe in their agencies’ missions will also help. Such changes happen to a certain extent with every partisan change in a presidential administration, but it will be particularly dramatic in the post-Trump era.
At the same time, much of the damage will not be easily reversible. Top Trump officials like Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Elon Musk, the former head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, prioritized large-scale reductions in the federal civil service almost immediately after Trump took office. The apparent goal was to reduce state capacity—the government’s basic ability to do things—by eliminating institutional knowledge and manpower in key regulatory agencies. It would take many years for the next administration to rebuild that workforce, which was precisely the Trump administration’s goal.
There is a thin silver lining to this. Perhaps the most pressing decision for the next Democratic president will be what to do with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency better known as ICE. During Trump’s first term in office, Democratic officials and activists debated at length over whether the party should support ICE’s abolition. Some Democratic officials thought it was a step too far, while others contended that the agency’s alleged civil-liberties abuses had justified its dissolution.
That debate effectively ended after the agency undertook armed, masked enforcement campaigns in major American cities, all the while displaying nakedly authoritarian tactics in an effort to intimidate the population. Trump has also eased matters for Democrats by showing how easy it is to dismantle a federal agency through executive orders. This would save lawmakers from casting a politically volatile vote to disband the agency through legislation. The Trump administration has used a variety of tools to achieve these goals.
For the Department of Education, for example, Trump officials announced a “reduction of force”—the federal government’s term for downsizing, also know as a RIF—in March that would eliminate roughly half of the workforce. The Supreme Court refused to block the White House’s plan even though the plaintiffs alleged it would severely compromise the agency’s congressional assigned functions. By refusing to stay the order while litigation took place, the court’s conservative majority effectively decided the practical outcome by forcing the plaintiffs out of work while the lawsuit continued.
A federal judge lamented in a recent lawsuit over the mass dismissal of probationary employees that even though the administration’s actions were illegal, the Supreme Court’s refusal to block them during litigation meant that they were impossible to reverse. “The terminated probationary employees have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” Justice William Alsup explained in a ruling earlier this week. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”
In some ways, dismantling ICE would be even easier than most federal agencies. For one thing, most of its current workforce is only temporarily assigned there. As of September, at least 33,000 federal agents currently assigned to ICE have been detailed, transferred, or otherwise reassigned there from other federal agencies. The Cato Institute found that roughly 20 percent of FBI agents, about 50 percent of ATF agents, and more than two-thirds of DEA agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement and removal operations.
The greatest share of these employees came from Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE sub-agency that typically investigates important crimes such as human trafficking and child-exploitation crimes. At the moment, 87 percent of HSI’s agents now work for Enforcement and Removal Operations, the other major ICE subcomponent. Restoring those agents to their original workforces would significantly reduce ICE’s headcount from the outset and allow them to perform their originally intended duties in law enforcement.
In the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed earlier this summer, ICE is also set to receive more than $100 billion in funding over the next four years, most of which will go to facilities and border-wall construction, and hire an additional 10,000 agents. The next Democratic president could significantly reduce headcounts through a reduction in force, perhaps by firing every agent hired since 2024. The Trump administration’s decision to drastically reduce hiring standards for incoming ICE agents would more than justify such a sweeping action.
What should be done with what’s left of ICE? The next Democratic president has a few options. One would be to reverse the flow of agent transfers. Instead of mass firings, the remaining ICE agents could be reassigned to other federal law-enforcement agencies to help pursue other administration priorities, like fighting white-collar crime, policing tax evasion by wealthy Americans, and enforcing civil-rights laws. Alternatively, the president could merge what’s left with another existing DHS subcomponent and erase ICE’s legacy altogether, similar to what the Trump administration did to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
It’s worth noting that dismantling ICE is an exception, not the rule, for how the next Democratic president will govern. There is a fundamental asymmetry in how progressive and conservative politics interact with the executive branch. DOGE’s war on the civil service stemmed from right-wing hostility to what they described as the “administrative state” and a zeal for deregulatory efforts on behalf of their wealthy benefactors. Liberal and progressive political goals, on the other hand, generally rely on a robust professional civil service.
Other tools abound. Trump has adopted some novel interpretations of two federal laws to achieve significant economic-policy victories. They offer promising opportunities for progressives as well. One is the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that generally gives presidents certain powers to bolster key industrial sectors on national-security grounds. While it is most well-known today for its role in COVID-19 production, President Joe Biden invoked the law on multiple occasions to accelerate green-energy construction projects.
Trump, true to form, has apparently used it even more aggressively in some cases. Politico reported last month that the administration has taken an unannounced majority stake in MP Minerals, a mining company that focuses on rare-earth minerals. While the president cannot nationalize private companies through executive order under the 1952 Youngstown precedent, Trump’s move could open the door to greater government involvement in how mineral and energy companies are operated.
Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is even more tantalizing. For most of its history, the 1977 law was used to regulate trade relations with hostile countries or during international economic crises, such as the OPEC oil embargo against Western powers in the 1970s. Its unusually broad language gives presidents broad authority to forbid and regulate foreign trade and transactions.
There is ongoing litigation over Trump’s use of the law to levy billions of dollars in tariffs on imports from most of the United States’s top trading partners. But much of the law’s language would be unaffected by a Supreme Court defeat there if it occurs. Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued in a recent concurring opinion that the court’s usual statutory-interpretation mechanisms—including ones that have vexed progressive policymaking, like the major-questions doctrine—don’t apply in national-security matters.
One thing a new Democratic president could use IEEPA to do is clean up the cryptocurrency industry. Cryptocurrencies have shown virtually no practical commercial uses since their emergence in the 2010s. Instead, they have largely become a vehicle for either pump-and-dump investment schemes or as an exchange mechanism for untraceable scams, frauds, and money-laundering enterprises. Crypto’s decentralized nature makes it difficult to regulate and target by design, but the next administration could resume the Biden administration’s efforts to punish illicit crypto exchanges and, more importantly, restrict U.S. financial institutions from interacting with them.
If the Supreme Court ultimately upholds Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, that would further broaden a Democratic president’s power to use the law to pressure industries and other countries. By declaring a national emergency over climate change, for example, a new administration could prohibit U.S. banks and firms from investing in fossil-fuel extraction projects in foreign countries. It is much harder for the executive branch to easily stop domestic fossil-fuel production by itself, thanks to congressional constraints, but targeting foreign investments would be on much more stable footing.
Trump has also set important precedents on foreign investments into the United States. When Nippon Steel purchased U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion earlier this year, for example, the Trump administration even leveraged its approval power over foreign-investment deals to secure a “golden share” in the Japanese steel company. That share gives the executive branch veto power over changes in U.S. Steel’s name, headquarters, workforce size, and future purchasers. The next Democratic president could use similar tactics to potentially secure things like higher wages and collective-bargaining agreements when foreign capital tries to acquire U.S. businesses and assets.
Finally, a Democratic president could wind down contracts with companies and executives that do not reflect the nation’s core values. One of the first quandaries that the next administration will face when taking office is Elon Musk. The South African-born billionaire’s business empire received an estimated $7 billion in federal funds through various contracts and subsidies. Some of them, like tax rebates for electric cars, are beyond the president’s ability to control. Others are not.
The Trump administration began a wholesale review of government contracting agreements shortly after taking office and instructed federal agencies to review and end contracts with Harvard University whenever possible. Given Musk’s vocal support for far-right causes and his history of racist and antisemitic remarks, a future Democratic president could wind down federal contracts with SpaceX and Starlink whenever feasible and bar his companies from future contracting services. Similar grounds could be applied to Palantir and other companies associated with German-born venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
With Musk in particular, a future Democratic president could potentially make the case that his personal involvement with these companies also poses a national-security risk. Musk’s top-secret security clearance, a prerequisite for some of his company’s most important contracts, could be revoked over alleged episodes of illegal drug use—which is typically grounds for denial for most clearance applicants—as well as his unusual contacts with hostile foreign governments like Russia and China. It is particularly troubling that such an influential government contractor’s companies are economically beholden to Beijing.
Musk’s companies also have a persistent history of anti-labor practices, especially when it comes to union organizing. Past presidents may have tried informal or bully-pulpit measures to support Tesla’s unionization, or left it up to the National Labor Relations Board. The next Democratic president could use IEEPA to restrict or block key Chinese transactions for Tesla’s production lines, for example, unless it recognizes a collective-bargaining unit and reaches a contract with them. Trump used similar mechanisms to pressure chipmaker NVIDIA into giving the U.S. government a cut of its profits from chip sales in China in exchange for loosening export restrictions.
The Republican Party was once wedded to a free-market orthodoxy that counseled against government interventions in the private industry space. Trump has demolished the party’s internal consensus on laissez-faire capitalism in favor of a more personalist, top-down model. He has also broken new legal and constitutional ground for how Democratic presidents can pressure, cajole, and perhaps even coerce American industry into carrying out progressive policy goals.
All of this assumes, of course, that the Supreme Court would grant a future Democratic president the same leeway and discretion that they have given Donald Trump. The justices now routinely refuse to stay the government’s actions during litigation when balancing the equities, implicitly arguing that the administration’s ability to carry out its policy goals is paramount. As long as that understanding holds, and the court does not constrain Trump’s innovations, so to speak, in policymaking, then progressives may gain a newfound appreciation for the court’s deference to democratic governance when they return to power—as long as the justices treat both sides equally.
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