Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295 text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo of White House, and vector graphic of crown
Note: My Apr. 4 blog post—#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same—I published as part one of three. Under my own Douglasian reorganization authority, and to make my own life easier, I hereby declare this post part two of that series. Part three comes—eventually!
On June 4, Rolling Stone published my latest article: Republican bill would legalize DOGE and let Trump dismantle everything: The Reorganizing Government Act is a longshot in the Senate, but that could change—and so would the separation of powers. As usual, I drafted more text than could be squeezed in, so please find below bonus material—mostly concerning statutory presidential reorganization authority’s history and some political philosophy—for the truly autodidactic among ye.
A short history of reorganization authority power struggles
The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025’s House sponsor, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), portrayed his bill during the Mar. 25 House Oversight Committee session as a fairly routine granting of long-gone special powers. “I want to reiterate that between 1932 and 1984,” Comer said, “presidents submitted more than 100 reorganization plans, presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, used this authority to create or dismantle federal agencies.” While President Reagan did briefly hold Congressionally granted reorganization authority, he didn’t use it to create or dismantle any federal agencies—he didn’t even submit a single reorganization plan to Congress. To give Comer’s Southern drawl the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like he just misplaced the clause “presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan” in his sentence. It should have gone after “between 1932 and 1984″—then it would have been accurate.
Comer also claimed “Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama requested renewed and expand[ed] authority” to submit reorganization plans. None of those past presidents obtained the authority, especially because, not to embarrass Comer or anything, Clinton never even asked. At the meeting, no Representative corrected Comer, but the Congressional Research Service report he received unanimous consent to enter into the record, does. (It also explains the accurate Reagan history.)
Clinton in 1993 tasked Al Gore with cutting bureaucratic costs, and in each term, the then-vice president’s National Performance Review pursued that mission. Among the Review’s thousands of pages was indeed the recommendation that the White House seek reorg. authority. But the Clinton administration never took up the idea in earnest, much less formally requested such powers from Congress. Comer’s claim, apparently an attempt to turn such minutiae into a main character to normalize an unprecedented power grab for Trump, is specious.
Back in January, Trump told Congress that DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk”; Musk claimed the austerity team is akin to the concluded National Performance Review, which was a White House-led task force—as DOGE arguably is.
Yet Gore’s crew traveled the country to listen to agency staff and compile their ideas into wonkish suggestions for Congress and Clinton to consider—and faced no serious legal challenges. In contrast, Musk and his 34-time felon president stand accused, in the AFGE lawsuit, of top-down rogue lawbreaking to dismantle government unilaterally from under the White House cloak of an efficiency task force. In their complaint, the plaintiffs write: “In sum, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], OPM [Office of Personnel Management], and DOGE have usurped agency authority, exceeded their own authority, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and ignored procedural requirements by requiring federal agencies throughout the government” to “Impose cuts to functions and staffing according to ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ imposed by DOGE.”
Musk boasted of his team, “all of our actions are maximally transparent”—yet they tell requesters suing for records under the Freedom of Information Act, No way, even after a federal judge found in March that DOGE is “likely covered by FOIA.”
If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were actually a cabinet-level department created through Congress, it’d be very subject to FOIA and other obligations. But DOGE’s ‘name’ is a mere label Musk styled after a dog- (or doge-)themed cryptocurrency he’s denied owning in a contentous, closed court case. The operatives’ continuing refusal to disclose their names and their literal opacity—papering over windows in a basement conference room—has encouraged accusations, including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), that the crew of hacker-y twentysomethings is a “shadow government.”
At the Oversight session, Comer ignored or dismissed concerns about DOGE’s doings, painting his bill and the Trump administration as simply cleaning the government up of unnecessary bureaucrats: “We have to have a reorganization of the government—it’s gotten out of hand over the past 4 years! Bureaucracies have grown, bureaucrats have increased in number, and the people taking it on the chin in the federal workforce are the ones who actually do the work at the bottom of the organizational chart. This is a reorganization for them!” (Yeah, sure.)
Curiously, Comer didn’t discuss the first Trump administration’s reorganization authority request. The related Reforming Government Act of 2018 died prior to floor voting. Unlike Comer’s legislation, the Trump 1-era bills expressly forbade plans to ax independent regulatory agencies or all of their statutory programs and would have constrained the presidential powers by limiting them to “consolidation authority.” Like moving a computer file from one directory to another, deleting the former location’s in the process and hoping everything works out with the file in the fresh spot, consolidation authority would have presumably preserved whichever statutory programs’ existence when shifting their position in the org charts.
Consolidation authority similarly made the Trump 1 request less extreme than failed Republican reorg. authority legislation from earlier in the 21st century. President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution. Bush 43 would have obtained statutory reorganization authority—unexpiring—to propose ending departments, independent regulatory agencies, and some/all of either’s statutory programs, but only if his White House deemed the targets intelligence related. Obama’s request for two-year authority, by contrast, would have left independent regulators alone and stayed under consolidation authority for his plan to merge particular executive organizations: he said he’d arrange six of them into a new take on the Commerce Department, eliminating the old one in the process—so he technically needed the power to abolish departments. Republicans feared he wouldn’t stop with the Commerce Department, but that dispute seems minor compared to today’s Trumpian dismantlings: Neither Obama nor Bush 43 were boasting that they were gunning to end the Education Department altogether, as Trump is. And the expansive Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 envisions no consolidation authority constraint for Trump 2, making Comer’s comparison of his bill with Obama’s request bogus.
In hindsight, the Trump 1 effort comes off like a befogged dry run for the Heritage Foundation, much of the brains behind it—and behind today’s more prepared, Project 2025-shaped Trump 2. After all, ideas for reorganization plans that emanated quietly from his relatively inexperienced, disarrayed first administration strangely amalgamized cross-partisan priorites: a smattering of low-profile, quasi-technical moves, among them merging food safety programs; centrist or liberal schemes like spinning off FAA air traffic control into a nonprofit corporation to better procure the latest, best staff and technology with less political interference; and conservative fixations such as prepping the U.S. Postal Service for privatization. That last is a jaw-dropping commonality between the 2018 and 2025 bids. In March, Musk agreed with Trump that the familiar, constitutionally authorized snailmailmen should be delivered to industry, saying, “we should privatize anything that can be[.]”
This most recent of reorg. authority’s three historical phases has seen Congress deny every presidential request for it since the statute last expired in (of all years) 1984.
Sometimes, these 21st-century bids have downplayed their expansive scopes by trading on the authority’s preceding, more widely popular mid-20th-century phase. That’s when Congress, often routinely, blessed most presidential reorg. plans, not infrequently advertised as merely improving the government’s operational mechanics. Reorganizers promised to steer clear of normative beliefs (somehow)—to remain agnostic about what Uncle Sam should do—and instead hyperfocus on tweaking how government operates.
These wonkish middle-phase plans—President Carter’s among them—have been lampooned as nothing more than “boxology”: shuffling agencies around on the org-charts without really fixing anything. Sometimes they have been rather mundane: President Kennedy’s first reorganization plan in 1963 restructured the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library with a change-up involving “ten guards, one repairman, and two janitors at a total cost of $87,000 a year.”
Other times, second-phase reorganization authority, largely freeing presidents from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, facilitated surprising results quickly from a birds-eye view. For example, President Nixon’s third reorganization plan in 1970 created the Environmental Protection Agency, now targeted by DOGE.
Searches for historical evidence of major savings from this better-liked second period—or any period—of presidential reorganization authority will find little, aside from some of its uses in winding down World War II. The same report from 2012 that Comer entered into the record states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.”
Reorganization authority’s earliest phase wasn’t so much about money, but about the first half of the 20th century generating widespread, amped-up hopes that significantly strengthening executive power to advance social goals could lead to sizable restructurings that would help heal the deep, long-lasting traumas of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The historical analogy isn’t lost entirely even on the unscholarly Donald Trump. He’s repeatedly invoked comparisons between himself and Roosevelt, who during the Great Depression and into the 1940s wielded enormous executive power mainly for very different ends: progressive New Deal social programs and fighting Axis countries instead of Trump’s You’re fired! commands for ever-smaller government and aligning with fascist leaders. Further, whereas Trump’s dismantlings this year have proceeded through a barrage of 150+ executive orders, many legally questionable—some paused by courts pending litigation—Roosevelt revamped government largely by ensuring Congress passed well-crafted, durable legislation.
Vanderbilt political science professor John A. Dearborn, who specializes in power shifts between Congress and presidents, told me that “FDR primarily viewed reorganization authority as a way to make government work more efficiently, and better, rather than simply as a tool to drastically cut back on agencies and functions.” That included a failed 1937 attempt to establish, at the same time as his proposed restructuring legislation would have granted him reorganization authority, a new Department of Public Works and a new Department of Social Welfare.
“Like Trump,” Dearborn said, “FDR was accused of seeking too much power for the presidency. He framed his ambitious reorganization proposal in 1937 as a way to ‘prove to the world that American Government is both democratic and effective’ while authoritarian systems were on the rise abroad. Congress scuttled many of the boldest elements of that plan”—among them its lack of an expiration date for his authority and not requiring him to seek Congressional review. “Nonetheless,” Dearborn continued, “while the reorganization authority lawmakers granted FDR in 1939 included some important limits on his powers, the law still relied on legislators’ assumption that a president would be uniquely focused on the good of the nation as a whole when formulating and submitting reorganization plans.”
The national culture backing FDR was an enormous facilitator of his reorg. plans and legacy. The culture back then was much more unified than today’s extreme polarization, as illustrated by the song “Why I Like Roosevelt,” originally from the 1940s. It’s embedded below as a 1990s-era recording of the elderly Willie Eason playing guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition and singing.
But another president Trump often mentions, this one trepidatiously, is much less well regarded, particularly due to his tariffs worsening the Great Depression. That’s Herbert Hoover, in 1932 the first president to receive from Congress statutory reorganization authority as presently understood, powers he’d championed as Commerce Secretary in 1924 for his then-boss, President Coolidge. During that year’s relatively mild recession, Commerce Secretary Hoover wrote that the public deserved “little right to complain about our economic situation”—foreshadowing Trump’s own Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, lecturing this March that if Social Security checks go unsent, it’s “fraudsters” who’d complain, whereas in such dire straits, his elderly relatives would just hope for their next checks in patriotic silence.
Hoover ignored the warning a thousand-plus economists sent him and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to dramatically hike duties on imports. The Smoot-Hawley Act was a major part of that era’s tariff policy, which Trump said, in his Apr. 2 “Liberation Day” speech, would have stopped the Great Depression had tariffs—Hoover’s among them—been even more aggressive, as his own were: per Fitch Ratings, Trump’s early April effective tariff rate was reaching levels not seen since twenty years prior to 1929’s Black Thursday. His recent tariff de-escalation with China significantly decreased the total effective rate only temporarily and still has investors anxious over yo-yo-ing uncertainties. (On June 3 Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum—from 25% to 50%—which will particularly affect neighbors Canada and México.)
Trump is likewise ignoring the warning of more than 700 economists and other scholars not to “repeat the catastrophic errors of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.” Tariffs generally raise prices of imported goods, effectively disrupting manufactural supply chains and taxing consumer demand. In a bankster country that, starting in the later 20th century or so, has compensated for offshoring manufactural production by using the military, the spy-meddlers, Madison Avenue, monetized intellectual property enforcement, and more to manipulate much of the globe into keeping the U.S. dollar the default international currency, it’s particularly perilous to crater the buying power of the planet’s biggest importers at the same time as world leaders are losing faith in dealing with The Donald anyway.
Fears of international de-dollarization—and of saying goodbye to stock market gains and Treasury bonds—among money-capital factions may well undo Trump. In January, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” and even the high school economics teacher in the comedy flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off managed to succinctly explain a 1986 version of why.
The economy’s bottom falling out would be a catastrophe Trump would presumably blame on anyone cast as his negative image—women, non-whites, poor people, those beyond U.S. borders in the supposed here be dragons lands—and leverage as pseudo-justification for further wrecking-ball powers, much of which the Reorganizing Government Act would legalize.
Akin to Hoover’s years of championing the idea until presidential reorganization authority became for the first time a real prerogative—and in his hands—Trump could claim that, to fix economic and other problems of his own making, Congress should grant him extreme powers, among them unmatched reorganization authority. It’s quite possible his allies would continue to paint it as nothing unusual, perhaps “not fit for camera” and along the lines of second-phase “boxology”—if they justify the authority to the public any more than the little they did at the Mar. 25 Oversight session.
Given such pessimistic precedents, it’s worth reiterating that Congress has denied presidents the optional reorganization authority for the last four decades and counting.
Vanderbilt University political science professor David E. Lewis, an expert on presidents and the bureaucracy, told me that “In the late 1980s, as the Cold War was ending and the peace dividend beginning, Congress pursued military cuts on their own. They created a commission—the Commission on Base Realignment and Closure—to recommend changes and made themselves vote the recommendation up or down with no amendments allowed. Congress did not need the president to help them improve efficiency via structural changes. They did it themselves.”
Reorganizing the response: extra material about Federalist 51
Standing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, Musk gave a muddled half-hour speech groping toward political philosophy as his five year old, X Æ A-Xii, rubbed boogers on the Resolute Desk and whispered to a scowling Trump sitting behind it: “You are not the president and you need to go away.”
Musk said that to understand the “whole point of democracy”—according to the FOIA-dodger, it’s being “responsive to the people”—we should imagine “ask[ing] the founders” as if they were alive today. Without specifying any founders or what they said, Musk then criticized the bureaucracy as an unelected fourth branch usurping democratic rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he seeks to “Delete” would likely qualify as such a bureaucracy in his eyes, though that may have more to do with the consumer-protecting independent regulators’ jurisdiction over his companies Tesla and xAI, probably a conflict of interest for DOGE, than it does with anything approaching political philosophy.
Besides claiming the bureaucracy overpowers voters and Congress—a set of debatable, multifaceted questions, to which he simply asserted an axiomatic answer—Musk didn’t address the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Yet “Publius” did, in 1788.
“Publius” was the pseudonym of the founder—almost certainly James Madison, Bill of Rights champion and later, fourth president—who in Federalist 51 argued for ratifying the Constitution. He explained how the core document, if treated as more than mere magic paper, can defend “liberty” by preventing, or at least forestalling, power-grabs by any of the three branches that might aspire to tyranny. That’s a risk inherent to expansive reorganization authority given to presidents who enjoy compliant Congresses.
Each branch, Publius wrote, “should have a will of its own” with members “as little dependent as possible” on the others. Although the Constitution permits Congress to delegate powers such as reorg. authority to presidents—much as lawmakers may delegate certain other powers to various agents, say, to independent regulators, the task of ascertaining abstruse particulars of complicated regulations—if Congress hands over too much, it risks losing its own will.
In a famous line, Publius wrote that the secret to maintaining the separation of powers is this: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Congressional ambition to guard its own turf and expertly will its own authority can counteract presidential ambition to apotheosis.
While certainly imperfect, ambition counteracting ambition is a formula leaps and bounds away from Rep. Tim Burchett’s “fully support[ing] any effort that allows President Trump to make government more efficient.” But the Republican from Tennessee isn’t the only one giving himself over to The Donald.
Such toadyism to an autocrat aspirant emerges from right-wing ideologies, among their ideologues Christian Nationalists and Silicon Valley adherents of the “TESCREAL” variety pack of beliefs that often uphold sci-fi-style eugenics.
Crucially, the ideologies mostly unite against another point in Federalist 51: in “republican”—that is, kingless—”government,” Publius wrote, “the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.”
Most predominant and consequential of the ideologies may be the neo-reactionary movement (NRx)—also called the Dark Enlightenment—which puts an outright despotic bow on the others.
In a January New York Times interview, the most prominent monarchist ideologue, blogger Curtis Yarvin, claimed Roosevelt took “absolute power”—FDR did not.
Maximalist unitary executive theory from both Bush 43 and Trump
President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution, and the failed legislation for giving Bush 43 reorganization authority should be seen in that context. Of course, advocates of maximalist unitary executive theory would say they’re simply using the Constitution’s second article to the fullest. For a contemporary statement of the viewpoint, see Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy agenda guidebook drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. They don’t use the concept of monarchy, but maximalist unitary executive theory certainly has the effect of facilitating the far-right project of getting the country there.
Soft coup to benefit foreign foes: National Labor Relations Board whistleblower Daniel Berulis
In April, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cybersecurity staffer Daniel Berulis described seeming Kremlin-DOGE digital cooperation in a corroborated sworn whistleblower declaration filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, sparking an ongoing investigation by the Board’s inspector general.
Berulis described DOGE arriving at the NLRB’s D.C. headquarters on Mar. 3 in a police-escorted black SUV to procure highly-privileged accounts on NLRB systems. Soon after, attempts to log in from Russia with those same credentials were geo-blocked, but followed by the DOGE accounts siphoning away reams of sensitive data to U.S.-based servers—final destinations unknown.
Per his lawyer, Berulis was threatened a week prior to filing his sworn whistleblower declaration: an unexplained note mentioning his then-forthcoming disclosure—complete with drone photos of Berulis walking his dog—was taped up on his home door.
In February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called DOGE a “shadow government,” a “hostile takeover,” and “part of a troubling pattern of Russian and Chinese Communist sympathizers increasing their influence on American foreign policy.”
U.S. statutes and federal regulations both formally identity, among others, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation as foreign adversaries of the United States.
This blog post, Extra material for my Rolling Stone article about the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2025/06/04/extra-material-rollingstone-reorganizing-government-act/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!
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