The Levers Trump Isn’t Using
A year into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of activity. Whether you think his administration has achieved great things or worry that it has unleashed terrible abuses, Trump sure looks to have done a lot.
But if you view the year through the lens of the president’s powers, all of that action comes to seem more circumscribed. By neglecting some of the most significant formal and informal tools at his disposal, Trump has largely failed to advance durable policy change, at least on domestic matters. He has dominated a lot of news cycles, but at the expense of shaping the future—for good or ill.
The American presidency is a framework of duties and powers. The president is formally required to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” for instance. He is also empowered and expected to propose measures to Congress and promote a legislative agenda. He is the driving force behind the nation’s foreign and defense policy. And we have come to expect the chief executive to promote his priorities within the law through regulation and rule making, and to work to convince other officeholders as well as the general public of the appeal of his preferred courses of action.
In the first year of his second presidency, Trump seemed determined to avoid doing much of this work, and to instead use the weight and leverage of the executive branch as a cudgel to batter opponents and drive changes in their behavior. He has worked around the formal powers of the presidency more than through them, and his goal often seems to have been not so much to govern as to show force.
[From the December 2025 issue: President for life]
The appeal of this approach is easy to see, especially for those on the right who have felt mistreated by American elites for years. It has enabled Trump to extract real concessions from some hostile institutions. But it is inherently shortsighted and reactive. And it comes at an enormous cost for the integrity and reputation of the American government.
Trump signed fewer laws in this first year of his term than any other modern president, and most of these bills were narrow in scope and ambition. The only major legislation was a reconciliation bill that contained a variety of provisions but was, at its core, an extension of existing tax policy. “I guess we got the big, beautiful bill done,” Republican Representative David Joyce of Ohio told The Washington Post in December. “Other than that, I really can’t point to much that we got accomplished.”
This is not because Congress is implacably opposed to the president’s priorities. Like every newly elected president since Bill Clinton, Trump began his term with his party controlling both houses, albeit narrowly. And it’s not that Trump has tried and failed to drive a broad agenda through the House and Senate; he simply hasn’t tried. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have any major legislative aims for the remainder of his term.
Congress’s lethargy isn’t all Trump’s fault, of course. In the 21st century, legislators have chosen to make themselves supporting actors in Washington’s presidential drama. In theory, that weakness could be an opening for a president to muscle Congress into codifying parts of his agenda. But Trump has shown no interest in such work. His team seems to view Congress as a waste of time and energy.
The pace of regulation has also been relatively slow so far. Executive orders have been plentiful, of course, but those are often just messaging tools. Only more formal rule making can really transform the administrative state, even if the goal is to roll it back. The Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University has found that, as of the fall, the Trump administration had advanced fewer economically significant rules than the Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Biden administrations had by that point in their terms. (Regulation in Trump’s first term was similarly slow at the start.) The administration has pursued some meaningful regulatory measures, in the energy sector and banking, for instance, and the pace of rule making will surely increase. But overall, regulatory action is off to a slow start.
The White House has also shown remarkably little interest in public persuasion. Trump prides himself on being available to reporters, which is important. But what he says in press conferences and public remarks generally amounts to vague sloganeering and disjointed boasting. He has not laid out a detailed case for his policies, or clearly described his thinking on most public issues. What are the administration’s objectives and expectations in Venezuela, say? What are the president’s domestic-policy priorities for the coming year? Who knows?
If the president is not doing much of the core work of the office, what is he doing instead? Trump has deployed two primary alternative strategies for executive action, both of which have aimed to use the presidency more for leverage and reprisal than for governance. We might think of these as a West Coast business strategy and an East Coast business strategy. The first pursued a tech-focused corporate restructuring of government. And the second has sought to replace policy making with dealmaking.
The West Coast strategy was embodied by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which transfixed Washington over the first six months of the administration. DOGE was an expression of a Silicon Valley view of executive authority, in which the purpose of an enterprise and its staff is to act rapidly and with maximum efficiency in response to iterative CEO decisions, rather than informing an executive’s choices and then steadily and accountably carrying them out.
[From the February 2026 issue: The purged]
Applied to government, the DOGE ethos amounted to blasting through chains of command and responsibility to allow for more direct presidential control of the levers of administrative action. The people attempting this struggled to understand the purpose of the distributed, competing power centers that surround the president, and wanted unmediated White House control of government information systems, which they equated with government powers and especially the flow of money. They did not see federal agencies as focal points of expertise and organization, and instead kept talking about the executive branch as just a set of buttons to push.
This experiment failed and is largely over. DOGE did not reduce federal spending in any meaningful way, because only Congress can durably cut spending. Appropriations were on a continuing resolution throughout much of 2025, which meant Biden-era spending levels remained in place, and no amount of caffeinated tweeting was going to change that. Combined with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and rising entitlement costs, this meant spending for the year was more than 3 percent higher than in 2024. Little or nothing of what DOGE did looks likely to be codified in the coming year, either.
DOGE did orchestrate some high-profile firings and buyouts, but on this front, too, real change would require Congress. There were about 270,000 fewer federal workers at the end of 2025 than at the beginning, bringing their number down to roughly the 21st-century average after a hiring spree in the Biden years. But the president firing people without replacing them or eliminating the appropriations for their roles only leaves openings for the next administration to fill. And if Trump’s successor is a Democrat, he or she will have an army of progressive activists to pick from who could easily be further to the left than the people Trump fired.
As DOGE faded from the scene about halfway through the year, the East Coast mode of governance grew more prominent. Rather than enact general rules (let alone laws) to govern sectors of society, the administration has tried to drive change by making discrete deals with individual drugmakers, energy companies, tech giants, law firms, universities, and other institutions. In return for public investments, research grants, beneficial regulatory treatment, or discretionary nonenforcement of laws, the White House has exacted all manner of commitments from these entities.
This approach appeals to Trump’s self-image as a dealmaker and to his tendency to think about political power in terms of individual news cycles. It also allows him to act with little congressional oversight or judicial review, and facilitates the shameless financial corruption and graft that have characterized this administration.
Dealmaking is most naturally at home in foreign policy and trade, and the president’s predilection for it has surely contributed to his growing focus on international affairs. But in the domestic arena, governance by dealmaking faces serious constraints. Its scale is inherently small, and the deals that get made are often treated by the institutions involved as temporary concessions made to avoid real legal change. The White House responding to the challenge of rising health costs by announcing deals with nine pharmaceutical companies in December was a good example of this approach, and its limits.
Both dealmaking and DOGE use the discretionary enforcement powers of the president—the power to withhold and confer benefits and penalties in specific cases—as leverage for affecting behavior rather than using the administrative powers of government to set predictable, uniform rules for whole sectors of society. In other words, they use capriciousness as a tool. This can be a source of real power in the short term, but it is ultimately very dangerous for American public life. Arbitrary government deforms society by making it hard for citizens and businesses to plan, invest, and build for the future, and it creates incentives for sycophantic corruption rather than entrepreneurial risk taking.
None of this means that a Trump administration that operated through more traditional modes of presidential power wouldn’t pose dangers of its own. The chief exception to these alternative strategies has been immigration policy, where the administration has deployed more of the president’s traditional tools. Trump and his team have sought and attained some legislative reforms, winning significant new funding and authority in last year’s reconciliation bill. They have pursued a great deal of focused rule making and formal regulatory and agency action. They have used the relevant bureaucracies rather than fighting them.
Needless to say, that has not prevented excesses and abuses. But whatever you think of Trump’s substantive policy goals on immigration, the fact that he has wielded the traditional powers of the presidency in pursuit of those goals has meant not only that his excesses have been more reviewable and addressable (especially by the courts) but also that his successes are more likely to endure (especially at the border).
Perhaps Trump’s most lasting influence will be opening the door for future presidents to approach the executive as he has, pursuing governing strategies rooted in capricious personalism. Still, for all the action of the past year, Trump has not been acting like a president. That has not only undermined the character of our constitutional system; it has also meant that he is getting less done than all the sound and fury might suggest.