Trump’s War Against the Watergate “Reforms”

J. Pestritto’s “How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State” argues that President Donald Trump’s attacks on independent agencies seek to restore democratic accountability to the administrative state. For once, I find that Professor Pestritto has not gone as far as he could have. The fight over the removal of federal commissioners is only part of a larger campaign to free the executive from the misguided “reforms” of the Watergate era. The goal is not just to render the independent agencies democratically accountable, but more broadly to restore the “energy in the executive” that is the “definition of good government,” as Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist 70.

Critics of the Trump Administration often invoke the example of Watergate when denouncing the president. They claimed, for example, that when President Trump ordered the Justice Department to drop its prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, he was repeating President Richard Nixon’s abuse of power during Watergate. On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered the removal of special counsel Archibald Cox for attempting to subpoena Oval Office recordings. The attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the order. Solicitor General Robert Bork, who also wished to resign, remained in office and fired Cox. Immediate and overwhelming outrage forced Nixon to appoint another special counsel, Leon Jaworski, who went to the Supreme Court to get his hands on the Watergate tapes; Nixon would resign less than a year later.

The Watergate comparison, however, obscures the true influence of the Nixon Administration on Trump’s actions today.

Beyond the effort to bring two dozen independent agencies to heel, the Trump Administration is challenging a body of so-called reforms that have in effect disrupted presidential control over the executive branch. These laws have dissipated the unity and energy of the executive branch that Alexander Hamilton thought was essential. (In fact, Nixon’s campaign shenanigans and abuse of the government’s law enforcement and national security powers were accompanied by more serious and damaging revelations of intelligence agency misconduct and failures in the Vietnam War.) The “framework” laws that Nixon’s political opponents enacted took advantage of the Watergate scandals to advance an agenda designed to fetter the presidency and limit presidential power.