R.J. Pestritto’s “How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State” argues that President Donald Trump’s attacks on independent agencies seek to restore democratic accountability to the administrative state. For once, I find that Professor Pestritto has not gone as far as he could have. The fight over the removal of federal commissioners is only part of a larger campaign to free the executive from the misguided “reforms” of the Watergate era. The goal is not just to render the independent agencies democratically accountable, but more broadly to restore the “energy in the executive” that is the “definition of good government,” as Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist 70.

Critics of the Trump Administration often invoke the example of Watergate when denouncing the president. They claimed, for example, that when President Trump ordered the Justice Department to drop its prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, he was repeating President Richard Nixon’s abuse of power during Watergate. On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered the removal of special counsel Archibald Cox for attempting to subpoena Oval Office recordings. The attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the order. Solicitor General Robert Bork, who also wished to resign, remained in office and fired Cox. Immediate and overwhelming outrage forced Nixon to appoint another special counsel, Leon Jaworski, who went to the Supreme Court to get his hands on the Watergate tapes; Nixon would resign less than a year later.

The Watergate comparison, however, obscures the true influence of the Nixon Administration on Trump’s actions today.

Beyond the effort to bring two dozen independent agencies to heel, the Trump Administration is challenging a body of so-called reforms that have in effect disrupted presidential control over the executive branch. These laws have dissipated the unity and energy of the executive branch that Alexander Hamilton thought was essential. (In fact, Nixon’s campaign shenanigans and abuse of the government’s law enforcement and national security powers were accompanied by more serious and damaging revelations of intelligence agency misconduct and failures in the Vietnam War.) The “framework” laws that Nixon’s political opponents enacted took advantage of the Watergate scandals to advance an agenda designed to fetter the presidency and limit presidential power.

The fight over independent agencies then raises issues that reach well beyond whether a president can hire or fire members of the executive branch.

Evading Responsibility

In response to the Nixon Administration, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (1973), the Budget Control and Impoundment Act (1974), the Federal Election Campaign Act (1971), the National Emergencies Act (1976), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977), the Inspector General Act (1978), the Civil Service Reform Act (1978), and the Ethics in Government Act (1978). Congress also launched a multi-year Senate investigation into the FBI and the CIA, known as the Church Committee, that led to executive concessions, such as an executive order banning assassinations and the mandatory reporting of covert action to Congress, which Congress codified after the Iran-Contra affair.

Congress had several goals in taking these actions. One was to claw back its warmaking authority, which presidents had supposedly usurped in Vietnam and Korea. Another was to prevent the president’s practice of refusing to spend funds Congress had appropriated. A third was to bring the internal deliberations of the executive branch under constant congressional oversight. A final purpose was to render the federal bureaucracy increasingly independent of presidential control.

However, these Watergate reforms weakened the institution of the presidency without truly increasing Congress’s responsibility. After all, the intelligence agencies still operate without political accountability.

In the first Trump term, the leaders of the FBI such as James Comey claimed that Trump was under Russian influence and prompted a special counsel investigation that crippled his presidency. Under the Biden Administration, the Justice Department pursued investigations and, ultimately, the prosecution of Donald Trump—the preceding president and the opposition candidate for the presidency again in 2024—for the patently political purpose of driving him off the ballot.

Additionally, Congress has delegated greater authority to the agencies to regulate more economic, health and safety, environmental, and cultural issues. And federal civil servants have frequently worked to thwart the policies of Republican presidents while aggressively expanding those of Democratic presidents.

The Not-so-Imperial Presidency

Presidents after Watergate have fought back with limited success. President Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution, but Congress overrode his veto. Subsequent presidents argued that the WPR violated their constitutional powers and have generally ignored it. Notwithstanding the statutory protections for IGs, President Reagan immediately fired them all upon taking office; Presidents Obama and Biden largely followed suit. The Reagan Administration attempted to cripple the Ethics in Government Act by challenging the constitutionality of the independent counsel, but lost in Morrison v. Olsen (1988). Liberals finally recognized the law’s errors once it was used against President Bill Clinton and agreed to let it expire in 2000. The Roberts Court has sought to repair Morrison’s flaws with Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), holding that the president must have the authority to remove executive branch officers who carry out federal law.

Trump’s challenges to the Watergate reforms are broader, however, than those of previous presidents—he seeks to undo the Watergate framework entirely. Trump removed all IGs at a stroke. He ordered a spending freeze to examine unconstitutional or wasteful appropriations, and he is challenging the Impoundment Act in court. He has reduced agencies, such as USAID and the Education Department, to their bare minimum functions—effectively shuttering them as engines of social change. He is cutting the bureaucracy through buyouts, firings, and transfers. Civil servants who disagree are resigning.

It is within this broader campaign to defend presidential power that the removal power plays an important role. Trump has on his side the Roberts Court itself, which allowed him in 2020 to fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who enjoyed similar protections from presidential removal. Restoring direct control over all executive officers would allow all future presidents once again to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed” with a single, unified agenda throughout the executive branch.

FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society created a massive federal bureaucracy to administer a wide range of domestic affairs once considered off-limits to the national government. Postwar presidents also constructed a permanent standing military and a vast law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracy. But progressives began to recoil in the late 1960s when they saw their machinery fall into Nixon’s hands. Practices that progressives had applauded, such as wage and price controls, presidential warmaking, and the reorganization of government agencies, became viewed as dangerous abuses of power under Nixon.

Progressives failed to control the Imperial Presidency because it was not imperial in the first place. While Congress has continued to make excessive delegations of legislative power (consider the EPA’s unbridled power to clean the air and water), they have crippled the energy of the executive branch while saddling it with vast new responsibilities. Congress handicapped the president’s control over the executive branch while empowering the bureaucracy and insulating it from the people’s elected representatives. The bureaucracy has increasingly gone its own way, neither taking direction from the president nor subjecting itself to congressional oversight.

President Trump’s flurry of executive orders represents the most aggressive phase of the campaign against the dysfunctional administrative state. If Trump succeeds, his efforts will redound to the benefit of both Congress and the president. Ending the cycle of expansive delegations to unaccountable agencies would restore congressional responsibility. Difficult choices in domestic policy should not fall to unelected bureaucrats, but should be made by popularly elected representatives. At the same time, the president would no longer be saddled with a recalcitrant bureaucracy.

Rather than an effort to introduce autocracy, Trump’s broader campaign to end the Watergate system would restore energy to the executive and responsibility to Congress—as the Constitution demands.