Analysts previewing a second Trump administration say he will now have unchecked power, with compliant administrators and courts. But there is a long history of presidents using executive actions to claim more power than they have—with the bureaucracy surprisingly resilient to oversight and reinvention. Kenneth Lowande finds that unilateral presidential action is often used for credit claiming rather than substantive policy change. The charade works in the short term, generating media coverage and group support, but it may undermine public faith in the long term due to unmet expectations. Trump’s first term was full of executive actions with media frenzy that amounted to much less in practice.
Guests:Â Kenneth Lowande, University of Michigan
Study:Â False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Do presidents have unilateral power or just pretend they do? This week on the Science of Politics for the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Analysts previewing a second Trump administration say he will now have unchecked power with compliant administrators in courts. But there’s a long history of presidents using executive actions to claim more power than they have, with the bureaucracy surprisingly resilient to oversight and reinvention. So what does research say about president’s capacity for unilateral action and how much might change under Trump? This week I talked to Kenneth Lowande of the University of Michigan about his new Chicago book, False Front. He finds that unilateral presidential action is often used for credit claiming rather than substantive policy change. The charade works in the short term, generating media coverage and group support, but it may undermine faith in the long term due to unmet expectations. As we gear up for the second Trump term, I think you’ll enjoy our conversation. What are the main findings and takeaways from your new book, False Front?
Kenneth Lowande: Sure. Well, thanks for having me. What are the main findings and takeaways? Well, I should probably tell people who aren’t super familiar with the presidency literature that the presidency literature is weird. Why is it weird? It’s weird because we’re a set of people who study less than 50 observations and we sort of have to make do with how scientifically inconvenient that is. So the presidency literature has always been kind of dominated by political biographers and biographies and a excessive focus on the individuals. And gradually that has morphed into the sort of thinking that presidents are special as political actors, that they sort of uniquely play to the ages, that they uniquely care about the national interest, and that they’re uniquely focused on the greater good of the country. And this sets them apart from other kinds of political actors, most notably members of Congress. So like my book in a nutshell is basically telling people yes, but really they’re just politicians.
And the manifestation of that is when we look at executive action, we look at the kinds of policies that they themselves are most directly responsible for, we see inefficiency, we see counterproductive policies, and we see empty policies. And the reason they choose those inefficient, counterproductive, empty policies is because they’re beneficial for them politically. They’re symbolically valuable. So I think the best contemporaneous examples from the Biden administration are the Gaza Pier where President Biden announced in front of $30 million people they were going to build this pier. It was going to be really efficacious. It was going to deliver lots of aid to the people of Gaza. And then three months later they put it in storage because it broke apart a couple times, injured American service members, and cost taxpayers about $200 million. And they knew in advance, or the military told them the Mediterranean is too choppy, aid groups told them that it was an inefficient way to deliver aid and they did it anyway.
And then, of course, there’s the Biden student loan forgiveness where they’ve been trying to, in this sort of piecemeal fashion, forgive student loans. But the first thing they did was this big swing and essentially attempt to forgive most or all of them. And the lawyers in the education department and the White House before them and the Trump administration had been telling them, “The president probably doesn’t have this authority. You’re probably going to lose.” But eventually they relented mostly to congressional pressure and internal pressure to try to go for this big sweeping forgiveness of loans. Now again, in those cases, you have to ask yourself, “Well, why would the president sort of willingly go into policies that were going to fail?” And I think the essential answer is the administration knew that it could be politically valuable for them to be seen as trying to service these key constituencies and show that they were doing everything that they could to move the dial. And of course, this is not just a Biden thing.
Biden’s not really in my book at all. Most of the examples from the book, they go all the way back to the George H.W. Bush administration. So it’s all presidents, Democrat and Republican that are doing this. And the book basically outlines all the ways that this political logic infects both the kinds of policies that they choose and the way that they hire, organize their presidencies and goes into a variety of other issues, which we can probably talk about here.
Matt Grossmann: So if this is all a charade, people know in advance, why do interest groups, the media, and the public go along with many of these actions?
Kenneth Lowande: So we could talk about each of them in turn. So for interest groups, that would be the set of actors in politics that you would think, “Yeah, absolutely, they are well-informed and they have strong incentives to make sure that everybody knows that a president doing this is not going to be particularly effective.” But interest groups have their own problems. They have leadership, they have donors and members. Leadership has to show that they too are efficacious and that they’re doing a good job and getting things done for their donors and members. And so there’s examples in the book of presidents taking some of these actions that ended up being empty, not actually moving the dial but at the same time, it’s clear that what presidents were doing was co-opting the interest group, maybe even going so far as hiring some people who worked for the interest group to work on that initiative.
And this allows the leaders to say or to turn to their members and say, “Hey, look, we got the president to sign this executive order.” So that’s one part of the story. The public, I found in the book, one, they mostly don’t really care how policy is carried out. They just want policy to be carried out. They tend to give presidents credit. We also know that the public is not super informed about how effective policies are. And this is not like… I do not argue in the book, and I do not think that voters are stupid. I’m not saying that it’s about low information. It’s like a fundamental problem of drawing an inference. So when a president takes action A, how do you know that it had effect B? That’s a fundamental causal inference problem that would take a dissertation worth of data to figure out.
And that kind of information’s not only not available to voters to determine what the effects of the policy were, it’s not usually even available to elites. So we’re mostly guessing. And then on the media side of things, the media’s incentive is to write quick attention-grabbing stories that are simple, easy for people to understand. And what I show in the book is that most of the time that plays into the president’s hands. So that causes them to write these stories that are almost kind of press releases where the president is in the lead, they’re getting things done, they’re in charge. And there’s almost no follow-up about how efficacious or how effective the policy is just because that kind of reporting is very difficult.
It also has a tendency to make them look biased because it might be negative. So I think all of these groups for various reasons, again, depending upon who you’re talking about, interest groups, the public, or the media don’t really have an incentive to either accurately represent how effective a president is and sort of go along with what’s happening or just don’t have the bandwidth and attention span to accurately judge how effective a president is. And this sort of sets up their incentives. It makes the credit claiming possible.
Matt Grossmann: So you’ve given examples of policies that seemed more substantive at the beginning and then were found to be more symbolic. But some of them sounded more like just policies in general have problems being implemented and get pushback. So like you said, student loan was obviously overturned by the courts as it was expected to be. But of course, student loan policy is now much more liberal and forgiving than it was at the beginning of the Biden administration. You might compare it to something like the Affordable Care Act. It was passed by Congress, but it also had provisions that were overturned by the courts. It also had pushback in implementation. Isn’t this just a general problem of policy looks bigger than it accomplishes at the beginning?
Kenneth Lowande: So both of those things can be true, Matt. It’s certainly true that… In a lot of ways the signing ceremony when Congress passes that big reform like the ACA, the spirits are as high as they’re ever going to be. It is like a bad marriage, peaks at the beginning and gradually gets worse. I think that that’s generally true. But what is also true or can be true is that a policy like the ACA is going to be much better resourced, much more effective than something that a president attempts to do on their own. So when Congress passes the ACA, one of the great things about them carrying out those policy or enacting a policy like that is it obligates the government to provide certain services to the public. Now, if the president were to try to do similar kinds of things, it wouldn’t obligate the government to give the public services and the general public couldn’t sue the government because they were denied those rights.
So this is one fundamental difference between executive action and congressional action. So it’s not just that every policy is hopelessly destined to sort of fall back to earth. Some policies are more efficacious than others, and even some executive actions are more efficacious than others. One of the things I show in the book is that there’s a lot of variation in these documents in terms of what they actually order, what their basis is in law, and how rhetorical they are. So something like the 1776 Commission essentially orders nothing and is based on no statute and resulted in no policy. That’s quite a bit different than, say, the tariff orders on China, which do have a strong statutory basis and did lead to something immediate. So I guess that’s a long way of saying that policy design really matters here. And the degree to which someone is let down by a policy is at least in part going to be a function of how much work someone did to design it, and some of these are sort of handicapped from the start.
Matt Grossmann: So how true is it that executive action is increasing and how do we differentiate among these many ways that the president has to do things beyond the traditional executive order?
Kenneth Lowande: So again, I get back to what I started out with, which one of the advantages of studying other institutions like Congress or the courts is they have these neat trackable outputs like court cases or a bill, and we can look at the stages of the legislative process that the bill made it to, and we can look at who signed those court decisions and what the decision was. And there they all are. They’re put out on a website. The problem with studying the presidency is the outputs are way more variable and way harder to track. So you could get a list of executive orders, but that would only be sort of the tip of the iceberg of all the things that presidents are doing. There’s over 26 different kinds of directives that presidents attach their signature to. And then there’s a bunch of other kinds of actions that you would also consider to be executive action that don’t have their signature.
So say DACA, there is no DACA order that has President Obama’s signature attached to it, but there can be no denying that DACA was an executive action directed from the White House. So we have both this false positive and false negative problem where a lot of the orders that have president’s signature on them are not really executive action. There are things like raising the rates of pay for government employees, which they’re required by law to do. And then there’s other actions that don’t have their signature attached to at all but were clearly White House driven.
So the book… I won’t belabor like what the procedure is, but basically I try to call out those false positives and add in all of the potential false negatives from omitting things that don’t have their signature. And when you do that, you see that no, executive action’s not really linearly increasing over time. There are spikes here and there in response to events which are kind of predictable, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not changing over time. If you look at the directives that do have the president’s signature on them, they’ve become much more rhetorical over time. They look much more like a press release. Presidents are justifying their decisions, they’re taking positions, their credit claiming, they’re describing their goals, these are kind of like broad marching orders for the rest of the government, and they’re reported on more. So if you have the perception that executive action is going up over time, I don’t blame you because the news is reporting about it a lot more over time. So if we look in an executive action from the George H. W. Bush administration, like less than one in three were being reported on. During the Trump administration that number was up above 60% were likely to get at least one news story. So this is an important part of what you now read about the American presidency, so it definitely looks like it’s becoming more important over time.
Matt Grossmann: You also delve into the details of these executive actions to try to measure their effects or at least how likely they are to have a real policy input. So what are the ways that you do that and how can we characterize them? How many have a real effect that can be seen?
Kenneth Lowande: Sure. So this is hard. The first thing that I should say is that figuring out how efficacious these things are in a real sense is hard. If I was in a room with policy makers right now and they asked me what proportion of executive actions are actually carried out and what proportion actually get the thing done that we wanted to get done, like lower crime or kill the DEI programs or whatever, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. And that’s maybe something we can come back to again, which you ask me, what do you want to do next? That’s top of my list.
But as far as what do you do in absence of that information? I think the answer is that you rely on the documents as written to give you a clue about how likely it is to lead to change. So let me go back to the two examples I mentioned before. So the 1776 Commission executive order and the tariff proclamations during the Trump administration. So you can look at these documents and look for clues as to how effective they’re likely to be based on how they’re written.
So the 1776 Commission creates a commission. It doesn’t tell that commission what to do, it just asks for information. It doesn’t cite any statutes. It’s really long, but most of that length is due to a long sort of rhetorical wind up, so there’s that credit claiming or position taking language. And at the end of the day, it resulted in basically nothing, like a 30-page unsigned report in December.
But then if you look at the tariff orders, they’re much shorter. They contain no rhetoric. They cite the statute from the ’70s, what gave the president the authority to do this thing. And they describe the content of the policy change in the directive itself. And so the book goes through and finds orders that are more or less like that tariff order, ones that directly affect the operations of the government in the order itself and tries to separate them out from the ones that don’t. And basically, I find that within domestic policy, about one in four orders are more like that 1776 Commission, whereas the rest are making those direct, sometimes ministerial, but sometimes important substantive actions.
Matt Grossmann: You also have an analysis about what the public expects that the president can act or where the president can act and where the president actually has some powers. What do you find there?
Kenneth Lowande: Sure. So the public expectations have always been important in this story, and I’m not the first person to talk about this, the expectations gap literature is big. The basic story there is people expect the president to be able to solve many more problems than they’re actually able to. And so the way that I quantify that in the book with one of my colleagues, Chuck Shippen, is we ask a bunch of experts, “Hey, where is the president most powerful?” And give them like 50 policy areas. And we do the same survey for the public. And the basic story that you find is that the public and the experts have sharply divergent expectations in that they think that the president is much more powerful in domestic affairs than they actually are.
And there also seems to be a strong recency bias. So when we did this survey, for example, we did the survey early in the Trump administration, pretty close on to the enactment of the big tax breaks. And so taxes scored really high for the public in terms of the public thought that the president was solely responsible for enacting those tax breaks. So that just showed us, okay, there’s a lot of attribution error. People really don’t have a sense of where public policy comes from. They just attribute it on the basis of who happens to be claiming credit for it.
Matt Grossmann: So you argue that this unmet expectations are unrealistic views of the president are part of increasing public discontent with the political system as a whole, so explain why you think that. And then I thought this was in some tension with a more kind of thermostatic policy literature, which suggests that actually where the president gets a lot more done, there would be more of a backlash. Like if Trump is able to massively changed immigration policy, like Biden changed immigration policy, the backlash would be bigger than in the places where action was limited.
Kenneth Lowande: So how would I reconcile that? Okay, so there’s two points here. First, there is kind of a laundry list of policy problems that have accumulated over the last quarter-century in American politics. Among them is what you mentioned, immigration, I’d throw cost of housing up there, I’d throw climate change up there, that are essentially unaddressed by the US Congress. So I think that that backdrop is there, and I think presidents take advantage of it.
As far as why is there no thermostatic backlash or even is there thermostatic backlash in response to what presidents are doing? There is in a sense. But if your question is, do the kinds of things that the Trump administration or Biden administration do on immigration, do they result in a serious thermostatic backlash? If your frame of reference is the overall problem of immigration, I would say no, because the things that they’re doing are still… Future administration exempted, there are things that they could do in 2025 that would be a departure. But if you look at the first Trump administration and the Biden administration and even the Obama administration, they’re mostly doing things at the margins that aren’t addressing the underlying problem.
So it’s almost like there’s this gaping wound in terms of policy problems, we haven’t had any serious immigration reform for decades, and they’ve just sort of scabbed over their left or right solution to the problem for a temporary period. But every president has said that they need more authority to actually address the root causes of the problem and reform the immigration system. So when presidents take action, I think they’re thoroughly motivated by these problems, and they’re definitely claiming credit for these actions, but what they’re doing is not really addressing the underlying issue.
Matt Grossmann: So our prior episode on this topic, Jon Rogowski presented some research about how under divided government presidents kind of expand the toolkit to new areas, and Dino Christenson reported some evidence that presidential action is constrained through a public opinion mechanism. So fit your work into that prior literature.
Kenneth Lowande: Happy to, because I would never say that Jon or Dino are wrong. They’re both always right. So how would you fit this story in with it then? Well, Jon and Dino are counting executive actions. My book tries to differentiate the ones that directly affect the operation of government from the ones that don’t. And there is some evidence that the actions that are increasing during divided government are more likely to be inefficacious and probably more symbolic. And I make the argument that during divided government, that’s the time when the president’s incentives to score these political wins are the greatest.
And the other point that you should know about this, executive power, legislative power, as Nolan McCarty tells us, those two things are complementary. So during divided government that’s when the president’s actions are most likely to be under-resourced and to not have what they need to actually be effective.
And then on Dino’s point, again, the argument of the book is that presidents are using symbolic action to make themselves more popular. So if you asked me should their popularity motivate them to take executive actions and to not take others, then I would 100% agree with that. And I’d say it’s totally consistent with what Dino and Doug Kriner have found.
Matt Grossmann: You find that some of these presidential actions are substantive, but a lot of your story is about why they’re still doing the symbolic ones. So that sounds a little bit like looking at a congressional office and saying it’s still passing bills, but it’s issuing a whole lot more press releases and then focusing on the press releases. Why not focus on the substance that’s still happening? How much power is there there?
Kenneth Lowande: Yeah, so I’m much more comfortable with symbolic action for members of Congress. Why am I much more comfortable? Well, for them, symbolic actions and credit claiming the opportunity cost is lower. There are people who are trying to make them more effective, who are trying to make them more substantive. Those people are doing God’s work. But I would argue that the cost of an individual member in the House, one member doing a little bit more symbolic action, the opportunity cost is just low. What else are they going to be doing anyway? I think the opportunity cost for the president gets to be a lot more serious because they have serious governing tasks that they should be undertaking. And so that’s worth considering on its own.
The second thing that’s worth considering is that sometimes these symbolic actions are actually pushing them towards bad policies. So I go through a couple of Obama administration actions in the book where it probably would’ve been better if they had just done nothing, because what they chose to do ultimately made some agency function a little bit worse or increase their workload. So that’s something to be considered. And then as far as why do you not just focus on the substantive stuff-
Matt Grossmann: Right. Why don’t you give us at least one of those Obama examples so we can…
Kenneth Lowande: Sure. I’ll give you that. Okay. So the example in the book is this order, so think back to the Sandy Hook School shooting back in 2012. Immediately after that action, the Obama administration was under severe pressure to do something, and they signed 23 actions within a month. And one of those actions ordered the ATF… Or actually ordered all federal police to submit firearm trace requests to the ATF whenever they recover a firearm. Now, it used to be up to the investigating officer. So that dramatically increased the workload of the ATF. And it turns out there is one facility in the United States in Martinsburg, West Virginia that does this. It looks up records on microfilm in paper records because it’s illegal for them to create a database of gun ownership. And so as a result, we saw a dramatic increase in their workload during the Obama administration, and their wait times went from five to seven days to now over two weeks. It’s an incredibly under-resourced and frankly appalling part of the federal government now. So again, it probably would’ve been better if they had not signed that order at all.
And then let me talk a little bit about substantive case because they’re important. So the examples like DACA or even to go back to stuff like Japanese internment, the things that are really accessible, the things that we teach kids in school, all of those are important, but they’re by definition exceptional. So one point that I would just make as a social scientist is that we shouldn’t be building theories around exceptions. So that’s why it’s important to think about the symbolic stuff too. I also think that-
Kenneth Lowande: … about the symbolic stuff too. I also think that exceptions are really important because those accessible examples legitimize the kinds of things that presidents are doing day to day. Right? That’s the reason that when a president signs an executive order, 10 to 20 people show up for that signing ceremony. And it wouldn’t happen if the media and voters didn’t expect that presidents were capable of doing this kind of stuff.
Matt Grossmann: So you also argue that executive actions evolve over the course of a presidential term, they’re more symbolic as we get closer to the election, and they’re more substantive in the lame duck. So I know that you didn’t look at this for Biden, but I wanted to see if we should expect a bunch of substantive action in the next couple of months, and if the Biden patterns kind of reflect the prior ones.
Kenneth Lowande: Yeah. So I wouldn’t get too ahead of myself because I actually haven’t looked at the data. It’s one of the things that I want to do, is expand the data set into next year. It’s on my list, my to-do list. But there are certainly examples from earlier in the administration. Most of what the Biden administration seemed to be doing on executive action was ripping up old Trump era stuff, and all of that was certainly efficacious. Then you have the examples moving into election season, the prominent examples that I mentioned, like the Gaza pier and the student loans, and now what they appear to be doing after the election. I mean, they were always planning this, but they’ll be trying to finalize some of those regulations. You’ll probably see some new national monuments declared in December, which will be efficacious as well. And that’s the basic pattern that we see for most presidents.
Matt Grossmann: And now we get to the second Trump administration, where lots of people believe that his power will be more unchecked now due to his willingness to push boundaries and due to a more compliant court system and a set of executive branch personnel. Yes, some of that might be campaign politics, but it’s coming from a lot of different quarters, people who believe that we’re on the cusp of some big change in kind of precisely this area. So is anything likely to change? And how much should we be dismissing this concern based on the prior patterns?
Kenneth Lowande: So no, you should not dismiss the concerns. I am one of those people who expects constant boundary testing. I wouldn’t put the primary cause of this boundary testing as the courts themselves. So I wouldn’t sort of blame the Supreme Court for this. I think if you want to talk about what the root of this and where the actual agenda power is coming from, it’s mostly due to the set of lawyers that are going to be around Trump in his second administration. There’s lots of stories of restraint. People talk about it as a form of restraint. Really what those stories are is lawyers informing President Trump about the wisdom of a cost and benefits of one action over another, and then him ultimately making those decisions.
So I think sometimes people sort of imagine that there are lawyers behind closed doors that are saying, “No, Mr. President, you can’t do this.” No, what they’re doing is they’re telling them what the cost and benefits of different actions are and trying to present it in an honest broker kind of way. I think that the set of “honest brokers” is likely to be very different in the second administration, which is going to lead to much more aggressive activity and much more novel uses of authority.
There is one point on this that I would make, and it’s not meant to console people who are worried about this because the concerns are real, and it’s fine. If you are opposed to these policies, then you’re going to worry about them and you’re going to continue worrying about them. But one thing that I would try to remember is that the barriers to presidents getting what they want, or at least having the authority on paper to do things, those barriers have been falling gradually for 50 years. Okay? It is not as if Trump is smashing in the Kool-Aid Man and somehow changing the presidency immediately.
Now, democratic presidents and republican presidents have been doing this for half a century. But there is one thing that is not going to change under a Trump administration, which is like a fundamental systems engineering point, is that the president is a decision-making bottleneck. Basically, it’s the president and a couple hundred people in a white mansion trying to control three million federal employees and the operations of the entire government, 200 different organizations with different goals. And they can only focus on so much at one time. So while I expect novel uses of executive authority, while I expect them to experiment, to expand presidential power, I think it’s going to be very uneven where it is felt and where it’s not. It’s sort of like the Eye of Sauron. It could see some parts of the globe, but it’s going to miss little hobbits going here and there. So you could expect big changes at DHS and the Justice Department, but there are whole parts of the federal government that are just not going to be felt by this.
Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that you were somewhat skeptical of the court’s leniency being a big part of the process here. There is also the story that the courts, in an attempt to take back power from democratic administrations, have given themselves some jurisprudence that actually might limit presidential power. They have introduced this major questions doctrine, which would seem to expect that almost anything the president wanted to do that was a high policy and priority would be more likely to fit that. So any sense that there will actually be more constraints because of the more long-running desire of the courts to constrain the executive branch.
Kenneth Lowande: They certainly handed themselves tools to put themselves in the driver’s seat as to what questions can be, and I don’t disagree with people who see the major questions doctrine as the courts trying to expand their own power. The question then has to become how much of the narrative that you just talked about, Matt, about presidents experimenting and trying to break down barriers. What is the limiting principle on that? Because if the courts on paper expand their ability to tell the president no, does that provoke a situation where the president is going to start ignoring court orders? And then what happens at that point? So I think a lot of this depends on what you think the president’s inclination is for that kind of legal combat and ultimately how much appetite there is for provoking a kind of constitutional crisis.
Matt Grossmann: So you did study Trump’s first term. What can we learn from it? How did he use executive power relative to other presidents? How much did the press and the public react differently to him versus other presidents?
Kenneth Lowande: So what ways was Trump different? Trump was, let’s say, more active and effective at the kind of thing that I’m talking about than just about any other president. Meaning they were really great at thinking about what kinds of red meat their constituents would want or what different kinds of interest groups they wanted to please would want, and crafting executive action that would throw that to those constituencies. So they were very good at this. They signed lots of directives. Were they more efficacious? No, I think they were more symbolic and less substantive. Some of that is due to an underinvestment in effort, like it is very, again, each one of these actions takes a lot of time and energy to actually carry out. And the Trump administration, until very late in the term, was ill-prepared to do that.
I was on a podcast with another Trump administration official, and the other Trump administration officials I’ve talked to very much reinforce this point, Trump’s impulses are, let’s say, to put a lot of things on his staff’s to-do list. So it goes back to my point about bandwidth. If he says, “I want to sign 200 executive orders on day one,” great, but we don’t have the people for that, and it’s going to take a really long time to focus our attention on any dozen of those. So I think that you can expect a similar kind of thing. You’re going to see lots of red meat for constituents. You’re going to see staff sort of frantically trying to catch up to his demands to get some of these things done, and they’re going to have mixed success. You’d expect them to be better prepared in some areas and less prepared in others, but their bandwidth, the things that they’re committing themselves, pre-committing themselves to before day one, is really quite exceptional. It’s a very long to-do list, and it’s as much of a burden as anything else.
Matt Grossmann: As you mentioned, a lot of the commentary surrounding the level of effectiveness or how much of that agenda got done in the first administration was about subordinates either slow walking or resisting his actions. They are more prepared this time to try to remake the bureaucracy, to schedule a lot more people as potentially fireable. How much does their success in that venture matter for the kinds of things that you’re talking about? If they’re able to have more of the executive branch come from their people, will that matter?
Kenneth Lowande: So the stuff you’re talking about, Schedule F, the civil service reforms, bringing more people into a kind of at-will employment where they’re fireable by the president, I view that as them trading off short-term control for long-term efficacy. Okay, so if you believe that the field of public administration as a whole has anything to teach people, then this point should hold. Because when you start turning some of these positions into at-will or into at-will positions, the set of people who’s willing to take a job like that is going to shrink, their competency is going to go down, and eventually some of these things or some of these agencies could potentially be hollowed out if you really follow through with their planned reforms.
Now, I think that by definition, that’s more deconstructive than constructive. So if their policy goal is deconstructive, to damage something that the government’s already doing, they’re going to be very successful because these are deconstructive type policies that undermine the capacity of the government to do basic things. But if their goal is more positive, like carrying out a mass deportation or building a wall, or they have some sort of policy or a positive domestic agenda that requires the coordination of a lot of individuals and you want to have individuals with expertise that are going to really work hard and do a good job, I think that that some of these things have a tendency to eat them, or some of these reforms have a tendency to cannibalize other parts of your agenda.
Matt Grossmann: So let’s talk about that deconstruction point a little bit more. There are people whose main problem with the first Trump administration is they said, “Well, they didn’t stop enough. There were still more regulations implemented by the end, the beginning, and all we really want to do is throw a big wrench in it.” What can we learn from previous examples of that kind of policymaking for how well that will work?
Kenneth Lowande: I think that on a deregulatory front, they’re likely to be much more successful than they were during the first administration. You have to remember that as… Some people are still going to be surprised by the time this airs, that Kamala Harris didn’t win. As surprising as that was to them, 2016 was a shock to most people and they did not expect him to win. So it took a while for them to get people in the administration who knew what they were doing and had similar goals, had the same kinds of deregulatory goals. I think those people have basically been salivating for the last three years and preparing to do some of this stuff. It’s still going to take some time, right? But the regulatory process has-
Kenneth Lowande: The regulatory process has procedural features and there are just some shortcuts that you can’t take. But I would overall expect them to be much more successful on that front. But again, that’s mostly about deconstruction, not construction. If they instead want to pass something that would be more positive, I would expect them to have a harder time.
Matt Grossmann: So on the positive agenda, it does seem though that Trump may be somewhat lucky in that two of his favorite topics, trade and immigration, come with more extensive executive power, more existing statutes to reference, and that may be a more compliant and prepared staff in those areas would lead to more success this time. What do you think?
Kenneth Lowande: You’re 100% right in that trade and immigration are two areas where presidents have the most authority. Mostly because on the immigration side, the story is mostly that Congress has abdicated its role through inaction. And so gradually … and there are statutes that are on the books that give presidents pretty broad authority that they have used. And this story’s pretty similar for trade. Going all the way back to the early 20th century, Congress started to realize that they just didn’t want to have fights over tariffs and trade barriers every congressional session, and that it was politically toxic to do so, so they kicked it over to the president and that authority is still there.
I think that the Trump administration to some extent, and you can already see this now, there’s going to be constant demands for them to carve off exception for these sort of blanket promises of raising tariff barriers. And to some extent, that’s kind of funny because a hundred years ago, that was the reason that Congress didn’t want the authority to begin with because they had to deal with all these special interests knocking at their door, looking for every which kind of exemption. I don’t know that they’ll ever get tired of that, but I guess that’s something to think about.
And then on the immigration side of things, yeah, he’s lucky in the sense that the statutory authority is there, but he still has to, to actually get some of the grander things that he wants done, they still have to be resourced. There’s a reason that Trump signed an executive order his first month in the presidency mandating the construction of a border wall and construction did not begin for another two years. There’s a reason that they only got 50 miles of new barriers built. Because they didn’t really have the money to do it. It’s the same thing with this deportation force. You can’t deport 10 million people with the resources that DHS has right now. It’s just not feasible. So those resources are going to have to come from somewhere.
And again, I go back to the point, he may in theory or on paper or in the courts be able to win, but the practical logistics of this are that you need them to be resourced. So he’s going to need a compliant Congress to actually get that done.
Matt Grossmann: So the patterns that you’ve given us seem like they will make it hard for us to figure out in the first few months of the Trump administration whether things have really changed, because everybody is kind of incentivized to make these things into a big deal. Trump wants to make them into a big deal. The media, the opposition, everyone will want to say this is the beginning of a big kind of change. So how will we know if these patterns are actually changing or if we’re just reacting more?
Kenneth Lowande: You won’t. Okay? This is a very uncomfortable answer, but it’s just the truth. We can’t know the effects these things are going to have until we let time pass. What clues could you use? One, you could have a general sense of where presidents are more powerful and where they’re less powerful. So some of the discussion that we’ve already had sort of gives you an idea of what that is. The other thing that you could look for is sober takes on, well, what do these things actually do? What do the documents actually order? And either attempt to peel back the layers or just go into the default mode that I’d recommend, which is to not catastrophize every time one of these things is signed and get in the wait-and-see mode.
Because again, all of these things they take time to implement. You may never even hear about some of them ever again. There are some orders from the early Trump administration that just seem to have disappeared. There’s like a graveyard of things that they had thought about doing, but it’s not clear where they went.
Matt Grossmann: Similarly, there are fears, or aspirations I guess for some, that people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk will be given these broad-task mandates over parts of the bureaucracy. Seems like your research would suggest they will have even more trouble actually making an influence there. But how would we know if something real has changed?
Kenneth Lowande: So this is in a sort of different category. So the Elon Musk’s of the world, the RFK Jrs of the world, they’re nothing new in American politics. We have decades of examples of prominent private individuals, prominent businessmen who have thought, “Gee golly, I know a lot and I’m really good at running a business, and wouldn’t it be great if I could go into government and just clean everything up and give it this business sense?”
Most of those people end up looking like fools after a few years. And the basic reason is something that any real businessmen who goes into government for a while will admit, which is that it’s really hard when you don’t have the unifying goal of making money to get everyone on the same page. Again, 200 different organizations, they have different goals. Some of the goals conflict. It’s hard to agree on a common metric of success. It’s hard to figure out whether or what you’re doing it is actually having an effect. So the positive feedback loops that you have in businesses just don’t operate. In general, I would expect those people to face real challenges getting what they say they want out of government. That doesn’t mean they’ll have no effect.
Again, the point about construction versus deconstruction. But in terms of having the positive kind of effects that they hope they will affect, I would be deeply skeptical, because the history has shown us that when people like that in government do that, they’re in for a rude awakening.
Matt Grossmann: You started by the usual look at the presidency, which is that we have a very small number of cases and they’re all a little bit different. I think there was a fear going into Trump, an academic fear, that this would be even worse for Trump, that every single time series or analysis would need a Trump main effect and interaction. But it seems like things didn’t work out necessarily that way. That yes, there were differences like there are with all presidents, but not all of the series broke. Is that true?
Kenneth Lowande: So I don’t think he broke the time series. I think there are ways that he was exceptional that have implication for research. One of them is that his personalized success at grabbing attention and the way he manages things. For example, I told you that his actions are more likely to be covered by the media. Now, if you were a social scientist and you were doing measurement and trying to understand what actions are significant, you would conclude, “Oh my gosh, he’s the most significant … he issued the most significant executive orders of any president.”
Well, maybe. Or maybe he issued the executive orders that the media want to report on. So I don’t think he breaks the time series. I just think he forces us to be really careful and think hard about measurement. The other way in which he’s distinctive is we probably have more contemporaneous information about the way his administration runs than any other in history, because the White House operation leaked constantly. Everyone was talking to reporters. And basically no administration has been like that. I think that that means, while we’re probably not going to have very good archival records of the Trump administration, we have a lot of firsthand accounts from contemporaneous reporting and the tell-all literature that has emerged after that, which us should make us a little bit more cautious about what we conclude from that administration just because we can see things in the Trump White House that we couldn’t see in others.
Matt Grossmann: What’s next for you and anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to include?
Kenneth Lowande: Sure. So I’ll go back to what I said towards the beginning, which is what I really would like to be able to do is to give practitioners a better idea of how effective executive action really is. Myself and a team of researchers, postdoc here, a couple of graduate students, we’re trying to start a project where we track the efficacy of executive action. And eventually, through a lot of case studies, what would essentially amount to case studies, of going through these, I want to develop a meta-understanding of when these actions are more or less likely to be efficacious so that we can better inform both the media, congressional staff, people in the nonprofit community, and people who work in the executive branch about whether this is an effective way of making policy and what would be a better or worse designed order.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website.
Do presidents have the power to act alone? How presidential appointments reveal policy goals and elite interests. How bureaucrats deal with political chaos above. How bureaucrats make good policy. And, How much did Trump undermine US democracy? Thanks to Kenneth Lowande for joining me. Please check out False Front and then listen in next time.