Andy Kroll

If you talk to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,

you come away with the impression that the overriding concern that most Republican members of the House and the Senate have in their day-to-day existence is winding up on the wrong side of President Trump, winding up on the wrong side of his most ardent followers.

when these confrontations have come up this year, when Russ Vogt has acted in ways that have thwarted, again, Congress's fundamental power of the purse responsibilities, Congress has essentially said, oh, okay, you know, maybe we'll put out some strongly worded statements saying we disagree.

Maybe we'll grumble a little bit to the Capitol Hill press corps.

But the

The Republicans who run Congress right now, to be clear, seem much more concerned about staying in the good graces of President Trump and his base than they do about asserting Congress's institutional authority, which, again, is really uncharted territory for how our government is supposed to function.

The power comes from a few places.

Some of it is the nature of the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, and I can get into that a little bit more.

Some of it, though, is really an extension of this maximalist view of executive power.

It's been referred to as the unitary executive theory.

This notion that

Article 2 of the Constitution gives the executive, gives the commander in chief vast powers, not just to dictate foreign policy or to shape the agenda of the various agencies that are in the executive branch, but to actually go in and fire people who...

are ostensibly protected by the kinds of civil service safeguards, workplace protections, in some cases, actual collective bargaining agreements in place, that the president has this blanket authority to just say, no, those bargaining agreements are not valid.

Those unions are not legitimate.

I can go in and just say,

You are fired at the Department of Education.

You, several thousand employees at the Department of Homeland Security.

Your positions are eliminated.

So there's that kind of almost a legalistic blanket approach that is just essentially pointing to Article 2 and saying Article 2 stands for a lot more than people think it does.

But then there is this little known, not particularly sexy, as you put it, but incredibly powerful agency known as the Office of Management and Budget.