Mini-scooplet: your correspondent has learned that Republicans are planning on using the Presidential Reorganization Authority to achieve their goals of resizing and reshaping government. What is it? Could it happen?

Donald Trump has proposed putting Elon Musk in charge of an official body tasked with auditing government spending. Trump has referred to this body as a “government efficiency commission,” while Musk has proposed a characteristically waggish title: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The DOGE is one prong of a series of Trump proposals to reorganize the executive branch and “drain the swamp.” But if Trump is going to succeed in shaking up the government, there are limits to what he can do without Congress. The president does not have authority to, for example, add or delete new departments without statutory approval from Congress.

If Congress grants this request, it would revive a process dormant for more than four decades and enable sweeping change to the executive branch.

Will Congress grant that authority? How could Trump use it to drain the swamp? Let’s dive in.

What is Presidential Reorganization Authority?

The Constitution empowers Congress to organize the structure and offices of the executive branch. Most major reforms therefore move through the ordinary legislative process. If you want to create a new department, you introduce a bill to that effect.

But from the 1930s to the 1980s, Congress periodically gave presidents an alternate pathway to reshuffle the government. Presidential Reorganization Authority allows the president to come up with his own plans for reform within an allotted time period. The president then forwards his plans to Congress, where they are considered in an expedited process.

Presidents have submitted more than 100 plans to reorganize the government under this authority. These plans ranged from the mundane to the dramatic. The EPA owes its existence to Presidential Reorganization Authority, as did the predecessor to today’s HHS and Ed.

For most of this period, the president’s plans would go into effect unless Congress passed joint resolutions disapproving of them. However, the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in INS v. Chadha ruled that this type of “legislative veto” was unconstitutional, so subsequent versions of Presidential Reorganization Authority stipulated that Congress had to instead pass resolutions approving presidential plans. This rule change made Presidential Reorganization Authority somewhat less useful and is credited with its fall into disuse, although there have been periodic pushes to revive it.

In 2012, the Obama administration requested that Congress revive Presidential Reorganization Authority to fold SBA, Ex-Im, USTR, and other trade functions into Commerce. Congress declined. Senator Ron Johnson also spearheaded a bipartisan bill, the Reforming Government Act of 2018, that would have reinstated that authority for President Trump. That attempt also went nowhere.

How Could Trump Use This Authority?

Two of the flashiest proposals Trump has made include establishing the DOGE and deleting the Department of Education. The latter has been a Republican priority dating back to the Reagan administration.

But there are plenty of other reforms Trump could propose. During his first term, he proposed eliminating 19 smaller independent agencies, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities. He also issued an Executive Order in 2017 directing OMB to compile a “comprehensive plan for reorganizing the executive branch.” That EO produced a 132-page report brimming with interesting recommendations, including:

• Merging Ed and Labor into a single department, the Department of Education and the Workforce (notably, this proposal would conflict with the more aggressive proposal to eliminate Ed entirely).

• Consolidate federal food safety functions into a single agency, the Federal Food Safety Agency (MAHA, anyone?).

• Move SNAP and other food-assistance programs into a reformed HHS, and establish a Council on Public Assistance to set uniform work requirements for welfare programs.

These proposals are on the shelf and ready to go, in a world where Trump gets Presidential Reorganization Authority. Whether Congress would approve these changes, much less grant Trump the authority to propose them in the first place, is another matter.

Will Congress Give Trump This Authority?

By now it seems likely Republicans will have a slim majority in the House and a modest, four-seat majority in the Senate. These facts mean the quest to give Trump Presidential Reorganization Authority would face big challenges from the start.

Any such proposal would need to pass the House with few Republican defectors (or support from moderate Democrats) and then clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to overcome the filibuster. Can Senate Republicans find a half-dozen Democrats to give President Trump the authority to propose sweeping changes to the executive branch? We doubt it, especially with Manchin, Tester, and Casey out of the picture. Could they hitch a ride on another must-pass piece of legislation? That’s a more likely path forward, although it would require horse-trading and winning out over competing priorities.

Reviving Presidential Reorganization Authority would require concerted effort and the expenditure of political capital. Congress could easily refuse to grant it, as it did with Obama. But even that outcome wouldn’t mean Trump is powerless.

Draining the Swamp Another Way

In 1982, President Reagan issued an Executive Order establishing a commission called the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government. This executive commission, which did not require congressional authorization, brought together private-sector CEOs to identify cost savings for the federal government. The project was known as the “Grace Commission,” after J. Peter Grace, the industrialist tapped to lead it. Reagan called it a way “to drain the swamp of overtaxation, overregulation, and runaway inflation that has dangerously eroded our free way of life.” The report generated by the commission identified hundreds of billions of dollars in waste that could be cut.

Sound familiar?

Trump will face big obstacles even in a Republican Congress if he attempts major reorganizations like establishing DOGE as a full-fledged department or abolish Ed, but he could still fulfill his campaign promise at the stroke of a pen by putting Musk in charge of a modern Grace Commission.

The resulting acronym may be less satisfying, but it would serve a similar function.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AI — AI researchers are looking for new, smarter ways to train AI models after the results from scale alone seem to have plateaued. We are hearing that this unexpected challenge has left most AI researchers really despondent; they really thought they were just on the verge of finding superintelligence, but it turns out that goal is receding further past the horizon.

#AI — In more positive news, Caleb Watney directs us to a valuable study showing the effects of AI on scientific discovery. The paper shows that AI-assisted researchers in a new materials lab “discover 44% more materials,” although it came at a cost; human researchers reported greater personal dissatisfaction, since their new roles involved less creativity and skill. Materials science is the lowest-hanging fruit of AI-enabled scientific discovery, since the underlying physics are relatively simple; in biology thus far results have been harder to come by. But, of course, materials science is already an enormous part of science–and of the economy.

#Immigration — Donald Trump was accused relentlessly of “separating families,” but Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies notes that “hundreds of thousands” of unaccompanied alien minors have gone missing after being released from custody on the Biden administration’s watch. He recommends that Trump establish a “Missing Migrant Children Task Force” to locate these children and crack down on human trafficking.

#Immigration — Speaking of, AEI’s Matt Weidinger has a useful primer on illegal immigrants’ access to welfare and government benefits in the United States. In 2023, illegal immigrants cost the government at all levels more than $150 billion.

#Chyna #Trade — We missed this last week, but it’s so insightful we’re posting it now. AEI’s Derek Scissors reviews the lessons of recent industrial policy efforts, and notes that quotas on Chinese goods might be a more effective decoupling tool than tariffs.

#Family — Heritage’s Rachel Sheffield has a report on how the modern script of love and relationships (in sum, fooling around in your 20s, delaying marriage until your 30s) is leading to fewer healthy marriages overall.

#Energy #Nuclear — The FT has an interesting write-up of a New Zealand nuclear startup that just demonstrated an innovative fusion reactor. In short, this reactor design levitates a superstrong magnet inside a cloud of plasma to keep the plasma contained, instead of putting magnets on the outside. If nothing else, it sounds badass. 

#Energy — Over at City Journal, James Meigs writes about Trump II’s opportunity to dismantle the Biden administration’s “environmental justice” juggernaut.

#Euthanasia — Alexander Raikin has published a bombshell report at The New Atlantis showing that Canadian authorities sat on hundreds of potential violations of the law by MAID clinics. The violations of the law in question are truly ghoulish. Up to one-fourth of Canada’s MAID clinics could be implicated. The bottomline is this: whatever the arguments for compassionate euthanasia in the abstract, what we see in every single country that adopted these laws is an immediate and very fast slippery slope to truly dystopian outcomes.

#FreeSpeech #HigherEd — David Acevedo of The National Association of Scholars is doing yeoman’s work tracking cancellations in higher education. His recently updated database records a remarkable 294 cancellations. Read the stories here.