Who Gives Federal Agencies Their Purpose?
The Trump administration is engaged in an ambitious effort to reshape government. During the Biden years, equity and climate change became central to the missions of agencies ranging from the departments of Labor and Defense to Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development. The speed with which Biden imposed these novel goals, and the speed with which the Trump team has extirpated them (in both cases, without explicit direction from Congress), raise questions about whose job it is to give federal agencies their purpose.
In principle, agency missions are set when these entities are created, and so remain rooted in the ambitions of the president and the Congress who decided they were necessary. Administrations of both parties implicitly recognize this reality. President Donald Trump is trying to eliminate the Department of Education, for instance, because Republicans have long believed that the department was irrevocably shaped by a novel understanding of the federal role in education shared by President Jimmy Carter and the Congress that worked with him to create the department in 1979.
Democrats, for their part, have their own lists of suspect agencies, such as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a division of the Office of Management and Budget. The Reagan administration tasked OIRA with applying cost-benefit analyses to proposed regulations; it has been considered a more Republican-friendly agency ever since. Similarly, the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to protect the homeland in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Democrats have subsequently been harsh critics of DHS, especially its immigration-enforcement functions.
At the same time, both parties are increasingly behaving as if every president has the authority to reshape agency missions in his own image. What would be the point of winning the presidency, after all, if the chief executive could not direct executive agencies according to his own mission? Do the priorities of a prior president and Congress have the right to override those of newly elected officials forever? Would that mean the only way for new administrations to direct the federal government is to eliminate existing agencies and establish new ones in their place?
On the other hand, if every new administration can redirect the basic mission of longstanding federal agencies, what reason is there for Congress to legislate at all?
Answers to these questions would dictate the strategies of the current administration as well as those of future administrations. If new administrations know they cannot deconstruct agencies or realign their missions, they may focus on shuttering old agencies and building new ones that are more aligned with their mission and ideology. But if presidents can give direction and purpose to administrative agencies' work, they might focus more on using them to govern than on seeking to deconstruct them.
In the end, these questions point to the character of presidential power, and to profound and consequential changes that have taken place in how we understand the president's relationship with Congress. It is worth considering how that understanding has shifted over time, and why it appears to be in particularly intense flux today.
PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIZING THE PRESIDENCY
There was not much precedent for addressing these kinds of questions in the 19th century. Agencies were far smaller than they are now, and their missions were both more limited and closer to their statutorily established purposes.
One important exception was Andrew Jackson's war with the Second Bank of the United States. Much of Jackson's effort involved fighting against Congress's rechartering of the institution, which he vetoed in 1832. This effectively rendered the bank a lame-duck institution until its charter expired in 1836. But even in that interregnum, Jackson persisted in attacking the bank, at least rhetorically: "If [the bank] does persist in its war with the government," he declared in 1834, "I have a measure in contemplation which will destroy it at once, and which I am resolved to apply, be the consequences to individuals what they may." He also clashed with the bank's head, Nicholas Biddle, by withdrawing deposits from the bank and redirecting them to state banks. Biddle, for his part, pushed back, calling back loans and inveighing against Jackson: "This worthy President," he observed, "thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken."
In the end, it was Biddle who was mistaken. Although Congress censured Jackson for overstepping the limits of presidential power, the bank ceased to function and disappeared once its charter expired. The episode was costly. In 1837, shortly after Jackson had left office, the United States went into a severe economic depression. Whether Jackson's actions caused the depression is still debated, but the episode did prove that a president could successfully target a congressionally established entity.
Jackson insisted he was authorized to go after the bank because he "boldly cast himself," in the words of historian Daniel Feller, "as the people's tribune," meaning he had received a mandate from the entire nation to act. Under this theory, Congress is elected locally, but the president is elected nationally, and can therefore advance a national agenda and use the arms of the executive branch to do so. According to presidential historians Richard Ellis and Stephen Kirk, Jackson's view "constituted a revolutionary change in the conceptualization of the basis of presidential power." When the people reelected him in 1832, after his well-publicized and controversial feud with the bank, Jackson felt his actions had been vindicated. In the words of political scientist Robert Dahl, his actions initiated a "pseudodemocratization of the presidency."
When Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, he expanded on Jackson's vision, arguing that by winning a national election, the president secured a decisive mandate. He then "took the further step in the evolution of the theory," wrote Dahl, "by asserting that in representing the people the president is not merely equal to Congress but actually superior to it." Wilson had previewed this idea during his pre-government career as an academic, writing in 1908 that the president "is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can."
Wilson was perhaps the first president to see that a presidential administration could be mobilized toward a single goal. And because Theodore Roosevelt had progressively expanded the government during his time in office, Wilson had a larger and more powerful instrument through which to pursue his ambitions.
When he took the United States into World War I, Wilson's vision for the war involved mobilizing all national resources. This included government agencies like the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which Wilson established by executive order, to promote (or really, propagandize) the war effort. The CPI also censored inconvenient information, including details about the dangerous Spanish Influenza that killed 675,000 Americans.
This conception of the presidency went well beyond taking care that the laws are faithfully executed. Instead, it insisted that the president could direct the work of government, even if that direction stood in tension with Congress's intentions when it created the agencies the president deploys.
CROSS-ADMINISTRATION MISSIONS
Wilson's transformed notion of the presidency came to dominate the federal government over the course of the 20th century. At first, however, it was implicitly applied to national goals that were either rooted in significant emergencies or would extend beyond a particular president's term.
When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, the nation was in a state of crisis, with the unemployment rate above 25%. Roosevelt had won a huge popular-vote victory (57.4% to 39.6%) and dominated the electoral vote (472 to 59). In addition, his party controlled both houses of Congress by comfortable margins. The situation gave Roosevelt wide latitude, and he took advantage of it — launching the New Deal, expanding government, and reining in Big Business in an attempt to combat the Great Depression. When another crisis — in the form of World War II — loomed, Roosevelt shifted priorities, switching from, as he described it, "Dr. New Deal" to "Dr. Win the War."
In this new phase, the war effort represented a cross-government approach, with federal entities simultaneously engaging in military-style actions typical of a nation at war along with atypical actions such as rationing, setting wage and price controls, and directing the private sector's industrial capacity toward producing war matériel. In both phases, Roosevelt was comfortable with orchestrating cross-government efforts to achieve a larger goal.
For the most part, Roosevelt met his two objectives during his unusually lengthy time in office. But the latter goal, winning War II, was taken over by his successor, Harry Truman. The period that followed saw an unusual elite consensus in American politics on a number of key issues, enabling presidents of both parties to use their significant leverage to advance substantive policy goals shared across their terms.
The Cold War offers one example of how this worked. Similarly, consider President John Kennedy's determination to send Americans to the moon by the end of the decade, which was realized two presidencies later under Richard Nixon — a chief executive from the other party who had run against Kennedy in 1960. Or consider a more extended effort: the pursuit of civil-rights enforcement across the presidencies of Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon.
Truman got matters rolling by desegregating the military and signing Executive Order 9980, which created a Fair Employment Board that could question agency heads' hiring practices. Eisenhower followed by establishing the Government Contract Committee, via Executive Order 10479. The committee called for a study of government hiring practices and required government contractors and subcontractors to use non-discriminatory methods in hiring. Eisenhower also used the military to enforce desegregation orders at an Arkansas high school. Kennedy acted in similar ways, using federal authorities to protect the Freedom Riders who were protesting segregation in the South.
These efforts accelerated under Johnson. He not only worked on passing landmark civil-rights legislation, he also implemented Executive Order 11246, which introduced the concept of affirmative action to the federal government and mandated racial hiring goals. The order encountered resistance in 1968 but was revived by Nixon, who expanded its reach. (The revised order was ultimately revoked during the Trump administration.)
The issue of civil rights, however, was unusual: It was one in which presidents of both parties sought to advance one important cause, albeit with different tactics and approaches. Congress issued legislation with similar goals, of course, but presidents acted with exceptional independent policy ambition, directing federal agencies well beyond their legislative mandates across multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican.
SINGLE-ADMINISTRATION MISSIONS
In time, presidents came to consider the freedom to set agency missions part of their prerogative, regardless of whether they shared ambitions with their predecessors. We now take such executive initiative for granted, but it is a relatively recent innovation.
The key to this approach is the deployment of multiple agencies, old and new, in pursuit of a single presidential priority. Consider the case of President Carter, who stated his goal to make energy policy a chief priority of his administration before he was elected in 1976. "From the minute he took office," noted Princeton scholar Meg Jacobs, "Carter made it clear that energy reform was top of his agenda." He gave a pivotal speech on the subject in February 1977, during which he wore a sweater to highlight conservation efforts. He then followed up with another speech in April, calling the energy crisis "the greatest challenge that our country will face during our lifetime," and deeming the effort to fight the crisis "the moral equivalent of war."
This emphasis was not merely rhetorical. Carter pursued and signed legislation to create the federal Department of Energy, which would bear the mark of his priorities. But he also required numerous other federal agencies — from the Department of Transportation to the Pentagon — to make energy conservation a priority in their various endeavors, even though their legislative mandates did not call for prioritizing such a goal.
The Bush administration's understandable focus on homeland security in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks showed a similar pattern. Bush, who had spoken out against "nation building" and argued for being "a humble nation" on the campaign trail in 2000, had to shift gears after the attack. Though he worked with Congress to create the DHS, he also directed all of the agencies of the federal government, even those not involved in foreign policy or national security, to prioritize anti-terrorism efforts.
WHOLE OF GOVERNMENT
These precursors give some context to, but do not fully explain, the Biden administration's aggressive agency mission reorientation following his election in November 2020.
Biden entered office following a tumultuous first Trump term that saw both the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic and the disruptive protests following the murder of George Floyd. Biden also received poor political advice from historians and others, who argued that he had an opportunity to carry out LBJ- or FDR-level government transformations, albeit with much narrower majorities in both houses of Congress. With his head inflated by such counsel and some political wind at his back, Biden took perhaps the most ambitious approach yet to redirecting agency missions, adopting multiple priorities and aggressively pushing them across all government agencies.
The first Biden mission, prompted in part by the racial reckoning of the spring of 2020, was a push for racial equity within all federal agencies. In the post-Floyd era, the racialist left was on the march: Universities and corporations adopted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and brought in DEI consultants to train their staff, while foundations and corporations donated massive amounts to virtually any entity purporting to advance DEI goals. Biden tried to channel this impulse into the federal government and apply it throughout the executive branch.
On the first day of the Biden-Harris administration, Biden issued Executive Order 13985, titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government." This order demanded a "whole-of-government" approach to advance equity and racial justice.
"Whole of government" was a relatively new concept that was first mentioned at the presidential level during the Obama administration. It appears to derive from the British concept of "joined up government," created by former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair. The idea is that government is now so expansive that big, overarching goals require leaders to push its entire machinery in a single direction.
The term's use in the United States also reflected a shift from a legislatively focused conception of government to a regulatory or executive one. It's perhaps no accident that the concept comes from the United Kingdom, which has a parliamentary system without an American-style separation of powers. In the United States, with Congress continually ceding its powers to the regulatory state, the executive branch seems to have taken on the roles of both writing the laws, via the federal government's regulatory apparatus, and enforcing them, through the president's role as chief executive.
Using this whole-of-government concept, Biden's executive order mandated that all agencies "assess whether, and to what extent, [their] programs and policies perpetuate systemic barriers to opportunities and benefits for people of color and other underserved groups." In April 2022, the administration issued an update on the executive order's implementation, reporting that 90 federal agencies, including all of the cabinet-level ones, had released "Equity Action Plans" comprising over 100 strategies and commitments designed to address the "systemic barriers" to the disadvantaged. The update also noted that the equity goal was a generational commitment, indicating the administration's hope that the new mission would last beyond the Biden years.
The update also indicated the degree to which these Equity Action Plans were embedded throughout the federal government. According to the update, the plans included "innovative strategies that agencies [were] using to embed equity in day-to-day governing." The Department of Labor, for instance, interpreted Biden's mission as a call to strengthen the enforcement of wage-and-hour regulations applying to underserved workers, especially "women of color," and to make it easier for these workers to access unemployment-insurance benefits. The Department of Housing and Urban Development saw the mission as a call to address disproportionate rates of homelessness among underserved communities and to reduce bias in home appraisals. The Department of Defense believed that its call was to "mitigate algorithmic bias" in artificial-intelligence development. These are just a few of the great many examples of shifts in priorities that agencies implemented across the federal government.
The plans themselves were only one aspect of the Biden effort: The administration also mandated that agencies create "equity teams" to develop goals, incorporate equity into performance plans, and generally enforce the equity mission. The Treasury Department created an "equity hub" with a counselor for racial equity assigned to "coordinat[e] Treasury's efforts to advance racial equity." Treasury also created an "Advisory Committee for Racial Equity" to advise the agency on advancing equity.
These efforts posed several problems. First, and most obviously, they defied the Civil Rights Act and upended the one-time national consensus on colorblindness in the enforcement of law and policy. But even more insidiously, these initiatives took the congressionally determined goals of agencies and redirected them toward the goals of an individual administration without authorization from lawmakers. If the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division or an office of federal contracting wants to take on this kind of work, that seems to be within their purviews. But having the Defense Department, which is supposed to focus on defending our nation from foreign threats, look at "algorithmic bias" instead of how best to use AI to advance our military goals is a different story.
Third, the precedent these moves established put up for grabs in every election the fundamental purpose of every federal agency. Finally, such efforts make congressionally directed government actions more expensive and less effective. Is it any wonder that, according to a recent study, China leads the United States in 57 of 64 technologies critical to defense, space, AI, and other fields? Having Pentagon personnel worry about "algorithmic bias" instead of fighting wars is just one piece of the added cost these missions impose.
The Biden administration was not satisfied with creating just one new mission of this sort; it adopted a climate-change mission as well. This crusade also deployed a whole-of-government approach, directing more than 20 agencies to demonstrate how their "facilities and operations adapt to and are increasingly resilient to climate change impacts." As Biden announced in a Rose Garden ceremony," every federal agency must take into account environmental and health impacts on communities and work to prevent those negative impacts. Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government." Biden combined these two missions with his Justice40 initiative to direct "40 percent of the overall benefits of all federal investment in climate change — to clean air, clean water, clean transit, and more — to communities that are disproportionately impacted by the environmental degradation."
TRUMP AND DOGE
These Biden administration efforts were costly, requiring the federal government to spend billions of dollars to pursue goals not directed by Congress. But they also set a precedent for future administrations to use the whole-of-government approach to attempt to advance their own political visions.
To the extent the second Trump administration is trying to transform agency missions, it appears to have in mind three goals, two reactive and one proactive. The reactive ones are attempts to correct the Biden administration's twin efforts to impose equity and climate-change missions on all agencies. The proactive mission is a government-efficiency push using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE represents an attempt to reshape the federal government by rooting out waste and pursuing aggressive cost cutting. This goal and the manner in which it is being carried out are likely to significantly affect numerous federal agencies, although it is hard to see past the breathless, panicked media coverage to determine its true impact. Its supporters insist DOGE aims to cut inefficiencies and to make the government operate more like a private-sector business. Its critics say DOGE is slashing federal services to the bone and recklessly sharing private government information with 20-year-old hackers running amok.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between. President Trump created DOGE via an executive order on January 20, 2025, with technology mogul Elon Musk as its effective head. It aims to maximize executive-branch efficiency in three key areas: software, network infrastructure, and information technology. Once Trump took office, he sent teams to different federal agencies searching for inefficiencies and fraud (its proactive mission) in addition to Biden-initiated spending to advance climate goals or DEI (its reactive mission).
According to the New York Times, DOGE staff approach contracts with a decision tree posing some key questions: Is the contract funded by Biden's Inflation Reduction Act or his infrastructure law? Does the contract provide money for DEI or environmental justice? And does the contract provide foreign financial assistance? If the answer to any of the questions is yes, the contract is reviewed or terminated. If the answer to all of the questions is no, the payments continue. One can see how the Biden administration's attempt to embed climate and racial-justice missions in all government agencies led to this reactive effort to root out the new missions. At the same time, the broad nature of the decision-tree questions could end up capturing initiatives that were not part of these missions.
As a result, DOGE found both egregious inefficiencies and absurd spending on things like "advancing racial justice in elementary mathematics" or developing a "personalized 3D avatar tool...for measurement of body perception across gender identities." But it also made cuts in needed programs like Ebola prevention.
To his credit, Musk said his team would get some things wrong and would work to correct them. It did this, for example, with the Ebola-prevention cuts. But every mistake made in haste created a negative news story and had the potential to cause real harm to a necessary — and often congressionally mandated — government program. The whole effort appeared to be on the chopping block itself after the spectacular meltdown of the Trump-Musk relationship in June.
Yet even with Musk and most of his initial team gone, DOGE appears to have remained in place. The DOGE website is keeping a running tally of savings which, in September 2025, were at $205 billion. DOGE officials remain embedded in multiple agencies, and DOGE continues to target climate-change spending. But overall, the DOGE activities are far less in the news, suggesting that keeping a lower profile might have been the better course from the outset.
It's too soon to know what DOGE's true impact will be. But it does seem clear, following both Biden and Trump, that future administrations will continue using the whole-of-government approach to create new missions for agencies, and to wipe out those advanced by prior presidents or established by Congress.
WHO DECIDES?
When presidents enter office, they have the right to use the powers of the presidency to bring about their stated goals. But they also have to do so within a constitutional framework that respects the separation of powers and the limitations of the executive office. Some measures can be taken by executive action, but others must be done by legislation. Although it certainly makes sense for presidents to want to dictate the missions of the federal government, agencies are duly created by Congress, which has the constitutional responsibility to establish agency goals and objectives. The fact that Congress has been steadily ceding its authorities to the executive branch, whether by design, paralysis, or a combination of both, does not grant those authorities to the president unilaterally.
As presidents gain power, and as the American people increase their expectations of presidents, all incoming administrations will be tempted to transform agency missions. Yet once presidents take that step, their successors will have an interest in establishing counter-missions once they enter office.
Fundamental transformations of agency missions used to be unusual, but we can expect to see more of them in the future. The real question going forward is whether presidential administrations can reorient an agency mission away from that laid out by Congress, and whether they can do so in ways that endure beyond their tenure. In the current environment, Congress appears unlikely to stand in the executive branch's way. It thus remains unclear what, if anything, will.
