There are some promoting the need for fewer restrictions on the President. They say, “He needs the power to break through Washington’s gridlock and execute the will of the people.” They don’t talk about which people; they don’t talk about which President or what happens when the next President has unrestricted powers. This idea is the Unitary Executive Theory. But, if we search the Constitution for the phrase “unitary executive,” you won’t find it. Article II, Section 1 says only that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President.” Those eight words now drive a legal theory barely forty years old, that has blossomed into a claim that the president may personally control or remove anyone exercising executive authority, for any reason or none. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter gave that theory its fullest endorsement yet, stripping removal protections from the FTC and, by its own logic, potentially two dozen other agencies. The theory has a name that sounds technical and modest. What it proposes is not.
What the Founders Actually Built
The Constitution’s structure was not an accident of drafting. It was a deliberate answer to a specific fear: that power, once concentrated in one set of hands, corrupts the person holding it and endangers everyone else. James Madison put it plainly in Federalist No. 51, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, because no branch of government can be trusted to police itself once it holds unchecked power. Three branches, each checking the others, existed because the Founders assumed that whoever eventually held executive power might not deserve unlimited trust. This was not because they distrusted any particular man, but because they distrusted the office itself, regardless of who filled it.
They were just as worried about a related danger: the persuasive individual who wins power not through competence but through charisma. Alexander Hamilton opened the very first Federalist essay with a warning about exactly this type of figure, writing that of those who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying “obsequious court to the people,” commencing as demagogues and ending as tyrants. Madison echoed the concern in Federalist No. 10, warning that people of “factious tempers” or “sinister designs” might, through intrigue or other means, first win public favor and then betray the very interests of the people who elevated them.
The Founders did not build checks and balances only to slow down bad policy. They built them because they knew that a sufficiently persuasive, popular figure was the exact profile most likely to accumulate dangerous power, and that the antidote wasn’t better character in office, but structural limits that held regardless of who occupied it. Unitary executive theory runs directly against the Founders design. It doesn’t just expand what one president can do. It removes the structural guardrail the Founders built specifically because they didn’t trust any single officeholder, however popular, however persuasive, to hold power without guardrails, or checks and balances.
Why the Theory Doesn’t Sound Good for Long
The danger in Unitary Executive Theory isn’t hypothetical or partisan, it’s mathematical. Power in America changes hands almost every eight years. Whatever authority one administration claims, the next administration inherits, regardless of party. The same ruling that allows one president fire FTC commissioners at will, hands the identical power to the next president to fire officials overseeing elections, environmental enforcement, or financial regulation. This isn’t a one-party problem or criticism: the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student debt in Biden v. Nebraska, ruling that his administration had taken a narrow statutory power and used it to invent an entirely new program Congress never authorized. Nebraska’s own attorney general called that ruling “a timely reminder that the President is no king.”
The objection is the same one raised against Trump v. Slaughter, just aimed at the opposite party. This symmetry is the whole point, and it’s why the theory fails a test its supporters rarely apply to themselves: would you want this power in your opponent’s hands? An idea that only sounds good while your side holds the presidency isn’t a constitutional principle. It’s a temporary advantage, and temporary advantages don’t last. They get used against you the moment the majority shifts, which in American politics it reliably does. A rule that can’t survive being held by someone you didn’t vote for isn’t a rule at all. It’s just power, waiting for the other side to weaponize it.
The Standard That Should Apply
The Founders didn’t design a government meant to work only when the right person holds office. They designed our government to survive the wrong one. They knew sooner or later it would happen, and the system had to hold regardless. Unitary executive theory asks Americans to trust that whoever wins the presidency next will use near-total control over the executive branch responsibly. The Founders built an entire structure of government on the premise that this is exactly the trust no single officeholder should be asked to bear. As John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton said, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Let’s not fall for the rhetoric and put all our trust in any one President.
