In our 250th year as a country, it is a good time to contemplate a question that has largely shaped the last three presidential elections: how much power should one person hold? Recent Supreme Court decisions, and the debate surrounding Project 2025’s blueprint for the next presidency, have pushed that question to the center of American political debate. It is no longer an abstract constitutional theory. It’s a serious decision about what kind of government we want to leave to the next generation.
Supporters of expanded presidential or executive authority make a case worth taking seriously. Congress, they argue, is often gridlocked, unable to pass even popular, widely supported legislation because of procedural rules, narrow majorities, or partisan obstruction. An “energetic executive,” in this view, is what breaks that gridlock. A president willing to act decisively where Congress will not, to force movement on behalf of the will of the people. It’s a case built on real frustration with a legislative branch that frequently fails to function, and it borrows its name from a real constitutional idea.
However, it borrows that name selectively. The “energetic executive” supporters invoke today is not quite the one Alexander Hamilton described in Federalist No. 70. That difference matters, because the gap between the claim and the outcome is where the people are impacted. In Federalist No. 70, Hamilton’s argument was narrow and specific: the government, under the Articles of Confederation had failed in part because its executive was weak, divided, and slow. It was basically a committee with no one clearly in charge and no one clearly accountable when things went wrong.
Hamilton’s fix was unity of command: one president, clearly answerable to the public, capable of executing the law Congress passed without the paralysis of a leaderless committee. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he wrote. Hamilton’s complaint was about weak execution. It was never an argument for an executive who could ignore, override, or bypass what Congress had decided in the first place. That distinction, energy in how the law gets carried out, not whether a law gets followed, has been quietly erased. What began as a fix for a slow, divided government has been repurposed into a rationale for a government that no longer needs Congress’s agreement at all.
The Repurposing
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, blueprint for a maximalist presidency, makes the intent explicit. It doesn’t merely propose that the president execute the law efficiently, it proposes eliminating the independence of the FTC, the FCC, the SEC, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and dozens of other agencies Congress deliberately insulated from at-will presidential removal. Its own language dismisses these as “so-called independent agencies,” and its stated goal is a president with, in the words of one of its architects, no institutions left in the executive branch he cannot personally command. This is not Hamilton’s energetic executive, carrying out Congress’s will with unity and speed. It is a presidency freed from needing Congress’s agreement at all, able to redirect, defund, or simply staff agencies with loyalists until the law on the books stops mattering in practice, regardless of what it says on paper.
Who Benefits
This wouldn’t be worth writing about if it were simply an abstract dispute over constitutional theory. It matters because of who stands to gain when regulatory agencies answer to one man instead of to the law Congress wrote. The FTC investigates monopolies. The SEC polices securities fraud. The EPA enforces pollution limits. The FDA decides which medicines are safe. An executive who can fire the people running these agencies at will doesn’t just gain administrative convenience, he gains leverage over every industry those agencies regulate, and every industry gains a single, persuadable point of pressure instead of an insulated body of career experts.
That leverage isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t cheap. Federal lobbying spending hit a record $5 billion in 2025, up 14 percent in a single year, with the health, finance, and technology sectors leading the spending. Research on corporate influence has found that every dollar a corporation spends on campaign contributions correlates with roughly $6.65 in reduced state corporate taxes. This is not evidence that any individual official has taken a bribe. It’s evidence of something more durable and harder to prosecute: a system in which sustained, well-funded pressure reliably bends policy in the direction of whoever can afford to apply it, regardless of which party holds the White House. Concentrating regulatory power in a single office doesn’t fix that. It makes the return on that investment larger, because instead of lobbying 535 members of Congress and a dispersed federal bureaucracy, a well-funded interest only has to reach one man.
The Argument, Stripped of Its Disguise
Call this what it is: a theory about how to execute the law faithfully, has been repurposed into a justification for not needing the law’s authors, Congress, and through Congress, the people, to agree at all. Hamilton wanted an executive strong enough to do what the legislature decided. What’s being built now is an executive strong enough to decide for itself, answerable to no one insulated from him by law, and reachable by whoever has the resources to make their interests his. The people who wrote Article II of our Constitution did not intend to build a monarchy with elections attached. They intended a government energetic enough to act and constrained enough that acting always meant carrying out what the public, through its elected representatives, had agreed to. When those two things are separated, energy without constraint, what’s left isn’t the executive Hamilton described. It’s the one the whole Constitution was written to prevent.
