Every president complains about Congress. Most mean it as a rhetorical device; this administration means it literally.

Days after the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s emergency tariffs, President Trump told Congress, during his State of the Union address, not to bother helping. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he said. He wasn’t referring to a bill Congress was considering. He was announcing his intention to find another statute on his own. And that’s exactly what happened.

The Trump administration has been remarkably candid about its desire to govern with as little involvement from Congress as possible. That has proven easier than many expected, not because the White House has discovered new constitutional powers, but because Congress has spent decades creating extraordinary executive authorities to address specific problems, from national emergencies and unfair trade practices to military readiness to disaster response. Viewed individually, these authorities seem narrow. Taken together, they have become a remarkably effective way to sideline the legislative branch.

The administration’s first attempt to impose broad tariffs relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), using national emergency declarations to justify duties on imports from nearly every trading partner. The Supreme Court said no, ruling that IEEPA allows a president to regulate imports during an emergency, but not tax them. And despite what you may have heard from the President, a tariff is a tax, paid by U.S. importers and often passed on to consumers.

Most administrations would have gone back to Congress to get clear constitutional authority to impose tariffs. Instead, the administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a little-used provision enacted during the Nixon administration to address balance-of-payments crises, using it to impose a 10 percent surcharge on imports from nearly every country. The authority, however, is temporary by design. It lasts only 150 days and expired last Friday.

So, the administration pivoted again. It launched two sweeping Section 301 investigations, one targeting manufacturing overcapacity across 16 countries and another targeting forced labor practices across 60 economies. Officials openly described the goal as preserving “virtually unchanged tariff revenue,” effectively replacing the expiring tariffs with new ones that rest on an entirely different legal foundation. Meanwhile, the administration kept the Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and automobiles in place while reviving Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930—a provision of an infamous law that had gone virtually unused for nearly a century—to impose new duties on Canadian alcoholic beverages.

Multiple statutes. Same policy. The legal justification keeps changing, but the tax hike on American consumers remains the same. The administration claims it never has to go back to Congress, and the same playbook extends well beyond trade.

Want to fast-track favored projects? Declare a national energy emergency. Executive Order 14156 directed the Army Corps of Engineers to invoke emergency authorities to accelerate permitting that would otherwise proceed through the normal environmental review process. States sued within months.

Or reach for the Defense Production Act to bypass Congress for a new subsidy program. Enacted during the Korean War to mobilize industry for national defense, the law is now being used to subsidize domestic critical mineral and rare earth production. In 2025, the administration directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Department of Defense to finance new processing capacity, turning a wartime mobilization statute into a subsidized, nationalized industrial policy tool.

Cant get your border legislation? Use executive authorities instead. Executive Order 14167 directed the military to help “repel the invasion” at the southern border. A follow-on memorandum transferred jurisdiction over portions of the Roosevelt Reservation and other federal lands to the Department of Defense, making it easier to construct barriers without additional legislation or adherence to existing environmental, procurement, or public notification laws.

The pattern is hard to miss. The objective isn’t to preserve a particular legal theory; it’s to achieve a policy outcome. If one authority expires, another can take its place. Authorities Congress enacted over decades to solve different problems become, in the hands of a determined administration, a single governing strategy.

No president could govern this way using only the powers granted in Article II of the Constitution. This depends on exploiting the layers of statutory authority Congress has delegated over generations. No single law fundamentally shifted the balance between the branches. Hundreds of them, taken together, have.

Presidents will use every authority Congress leaves available to them. That’s not the surprising part. The surprising part is how many extraordinary authorities remain on the books, how much they overlap, and how little attention Congress has paid to the system it has created.

If lawmakers want to reclaim their constitutional role, as they should, they need to stop thinking about these authorities as isolated statutes and start looking at how they work together. Congress cannot reclaim powers it has never fully inventoried. It should identify overlapping authorities, determine which have outlived their original purpose, repeal those that are no longer needed, and place meaningful sunset dates on those that remain.

Justice Neil Gorsuch closed his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter, a case about presidential control over independent agencies, by looking beyond the immediate dispute. His concern was not simply who controls the executive branch, but how much lawmaking authority Congress has delegated away in the first place:

“The fact remains that Congress has endowed formerly independent agencies not just with executive authority, but with enormous legislative and judicial powers as well. And now the President enjoys control over all those powers too. From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts. We have tolerated adventurous theories long enough. It is time to return, all the way, to the Constitution.”

Hear, hear.