And finally, the president’s authority over the structuring of the executive branch.
Congress creates government agencies by law, and the president has inherent authority under the Constitution to organize his own White House. But presidents also claim that Congress provides underlying authority in preexisting laws to establish additional agencies, such as USAID, which was first created by Kennedy in 1961 by Executive Order 10973. (Congress later ratified USAID’s creation in 1998.)
The questions that will arise from reducing the size and role of USAID and possibly making it a component of the State Department will examine how far a president can go in reorganizing a dysfunctional and bloated government.
Again, the president’s team knows they will get sued for this. And the Swamp will certainly file suit in liberal jurisdictions where they will expect favorable rulings. But this is a long game of eventually getting to the Supreme Court, likely in 2026.
But here’s the kicker: President Trump does not need to win all those lawsuits to achieve the historic reforms he seeks. There are multiple routes to victory.
For one, there is a parallel here with what the Supreme Court did with part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Section 5 of the VRA required certain states and localities – mostly in the South – to get “preclearance” from the U.S. Department of Justice before changing any voting laws or procedures. Conservatives argued this was a violation of state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, and the 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding Section 5 emphasized that only extreme racism that was widespread in certain places in the 1960s made such federal supervision constitutional in those places.
But years later in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2013 declined to revisit the constitutionality of Section 5, instead holding that the formula found in neighboring Section 4 for determining which states needed preclearance was outdated – holding that “current burdens [on state sovereignty] must be justified by current needs” – and tasking Congress with passing a new formula.
Congress was unable to do so because racism is no longer concentrated in certain states – and does not resemble the appalling abuses of the past – so the entire preclearance regime became defunct without repealing or invalidating Section 5.
Many of these legal challenges over USAID could reach similar results, not directly addressing the central questions, but agreeing on an essential secondary issue, without which the program or component President Trump is targeting can no longer function in a way that created the problem in the first place.
Another route to victory could in some respects be similar to how Franklin D. Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933. FDR took unprecedented steps right out of the gate, many of which were challenged in court. He won some of those cases while losing others. But even on issues where he lost, he so profoundly changed the political landscape on those issues that the size and shape of government caught up in just a few years, and by 1937 the Supreme Court let many of those later changes stand that had initially been invalidated.
So too, President Trump can create a “new normal” in key areas of government that, if the American people embrace them, will become lasting changes through the political process and popular support rather than court victories alone.
Major changes in spending, personnel, and government structure might achieve such widespread support, as most Americans will recognize those principles as applying in their everyday lives.
“Most Americans understand all this to be common sense,” Ambassador Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Conservative Action Project and chairman of a center at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. “The idea that any organization is required by law to waste money or to spend it in a manner contrary to the agenda of the organization’s chief executive would be considered crazy by most reasonable people.”
“You can’t run a household or a company that way, so most Americans rightly believe you can’t successfully run a country that way either,” Blackwell added.
President Trump’s first couple weeks demonstrate a determination to make major changes to a governmental system that most Americans agree does not work as it should, and is willing to fight for those issues in court, in Congress, and to take those issues straight to the American people.
The president ran promising to make such changes, and the American people are in for quite a ride as the president tackles supporters of the status quote to deliver on those promises.
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Klukowski is a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter)
@kenklukowski.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
