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WASHINGTON— Donald Trump's rapid-fire efforts to expand presidential authority seem likely to prompt key test cases at the Supreme Court he helped shape, according to legal experts, with the conservative supermajority signaling in past rulings that it may be open to landmark changes in the balance of power.
In the opening weeks of his second term, Trump has fired inspectors general, frozen federal grants and loans, removed the leadership of independent agencies and dismantled civil service protections.
Behind the seemingly scattershot array, analysts see a common goal: A decades-long effort by conservatives to boldly grow the power of the presidency through a principle that says the executive branch has sole authority to hire and fire agency employees and control their policies.
The Supreme Court has also embraced the "unitary executive theory," as the legal idea is known.
Legal experts and Trump allies said some of the new administration's opening moves appear calibrated to tee up cases that rely on the theory, before a friendly Supreme Court that includes three appointees from Trump's first term. Rulings in favor of the executive branch could cement a vision of the presidency defined by untrammeled authority.
Daniel Suhr, president of the conservative public interest law firm Center for American Rights, said the Trump team has had four years since his first term to define its priorities and "set the agenda up to survive if it is challenged in court."
"The U.S. Supreme Court has been trending in his direction," Suhr said, particularly in knocking down constraints on the president's ability to fire federal employees. "The court over the past 10 to 15 years … has certainly been laying the foundation stones to recognize presidential authority over the executive branch."
No ruling embodies that trend more than the Supreme Court's landmark decision in July to grant presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution for official acts, a case that stemmed from the Justice Department's effort to prosecute Trump for allegedly trying to block the results of the 2020 election. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority that "unlike anyone else," the president "is a branch of government" and needs to be free from the fear of prosecution to forcefully enact his agenda.
"The Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President," said Roberts, one of five justices on the high court who previously worked as attorneys for presidents.
The ruling drew fierce pushback from the court's liberals, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor calling it a blow to democracy that created a president who "is now a king above the law."
Other Supreme Court decisions inspired by the unitary executive theory include a 5-4 ruling in 2020 known as Seila Law, in which the court found the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional because it had a single head who could only be removed by the president for cause. Congress had required the executive branch to provide a reason for firing the head of the bureau as a way to insulate the agency from political interference. But the high court ruled the provision violated the separation of powers. Roberts again embraced a muscular view of the presidency in his majority opinion, writing that the Constitution vests executive power - "all of it" - in the president.
Legal experts said the opinion was especially notable because it left open the possibility that the high court might be willing to go even further, overruling a landmark 1935 decision known as Humphrey's Executor that established the constitutionality of independent agencies overseen by multimember boards.
Those agencies includes some of the nation's most powerful regulators, such as the Federal Reserve, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Election Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
David M. Driesen, a professor at the Syracuse College of Law, said allowing presidents to remove members of those agencies without cause could create a dangerous concentration of power, which he likened to countries such as Hungary that have slid toward authoritarianism.
Most functioning democracies have independent agencies overseeing critical sectors such as elections, the news media, banks and law enforcement to keep them from being politicized, Driesen said. In the United States, concerns about guardrails for criminal and civil investigations have for decades given the Justice Department more independence from the White House than other Cabinet-level agencies.
"It's very, very dangerous to operate under the unitary executive theory when you have a president with autocratic tendencies," Driesen said. "If a president had control of prosecution, he could protect his friends and attack his enemies. If the president has control over the election commission, he can tilt elections in his favor. If he controls communications commissions, he can get rid of opposition media."
Conservatives make a counter argument: The federal bureaucracy has grown so large and independent, they say, that it thwarts the will of democratically elected presidents to enact their agenda. The "administrative state" or "deep state" has essentially become a fourth branch of government in their view, unaccountable to the people.
President Ronald Reagan's administration was the first to formulate the unitary executive theory in the 1980s, as a response to limits placed on the presidency to address the excesses of Watergate and rein in federal regulatory agencies.
The theory became more broadly known during the presidency of George W. Bush, who cited it as justification for controversial "signing statements" he attached to laws passed by Congress to declare he would not enforce portions he deemed unconstitutional.
In one of the most widely debated statements, Bush signed a law banning the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody during the War on Terror, but said he would adhere to his own definition of torture. Critics accused him of attempting to sidestep the law's intent and thwart the will of Congress.
Project 2025, the massive effort to create a transition plan for the new Trump administration, alludes to the unitary executive theory as a guiding principle in its 900-page planning document. Proponents say the theory rests on a plain reading of Article II of the Constitution, which says executive power "shall be vested in a President of the United States" and the executive "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
Trump famously seemed to express an exaggerated version of that interpretation during a speech in his first term: "I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president," he said.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has rapidly pursued a supercharged version of presidential power. His administration briefly seized congressional authority to appropriate funds, removed Democratic commissioners from the National Labor Relations Board and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and took control of the U.S. Agency for International Development. When the acting deputy attorney general fired Justice Department prosecutors who had been involved in Trump's federal criminal cases, he said he had the power to do so because of Article II.
The moves, which have been or are expected to be challenged in court, have alarmed Democrats and thrilled conservatives.
"He expects the people in the agencies, whether appointees, civil servants or senior executive service folks, to follow through on implementing the agenda the American people elected him to put in place," said Suhr, of the Center for American Rights. Legal experts said the Trump administration might be calculating that any fights over the removal of board members from the NLRB and EEOC could serve as test cases for the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey's Executor, which established the lawfulness of those independent agencies.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have written in opinions they are open to nixing the 90-year-old precedent, but it's unclear whether the rest of the court would be willing to go that far. Placing such agencies as the Federal Reserve under direct presidential control could allow politicians to influence crucial economic decisions such as raising and lowering interest rates for political gain.
Conservatives separately say the Supreme Court's embrace of unitary executive theory might make it willing to ratify Trump's push to strip job protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, put career federal executives under greater presidential control and ratify his firing of about 17 inspectors general.
Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management in the first Trump administration and led the Project 2025 coalition, was bullish on Trump's efforts to expand presidential power, saying in particular that he thinks the high court might be willing to allow the president's moves on federal executives.
"It's clear the time is nigh," Dans said. "We have seen a big appetite on the Supreme Court to change this. Think of it as a constitutional attic cleaning and shoring up the fundamental separation of powers."
Mitchel Sollenberger, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, said Trump appears ready to continue a consolidation of power that has been pushed by Republican and Democratic presidents alike in recent decades. Bill Clinton, for example, relied on an executive order to launch a bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Barack Obama issued orders to address climate change and the immigration crisis.
"President Trump is not an anomaly," Sollenberger said. "There is clearly a trajectory of accumulation of presidential power. Really, there needs to be a conversation around what is the balance. Has the balance tipped too far in favor of the president?"