How Trump Exploits Emergency Declarations to Expand Presidential Power

Briefing|How Trump Exploits Emergency Declarations to Expand Presidential Power

The United States is a nation in crisis, President Trump says. The problems are both profound and urgent. He knows how to fix them, but his ideas are hard to implement: They require new legislation or lumbering legal petitions. But there’s a way around that. The law often gives the president new and broad powers in a state of emergency.

So he has declared nearly a dozen. Trump can deport immigrants without due process, he says, because it’s an emergency to fight a Venezuelan gang’s invasion. He can dispatch federal troops to L.A. and D.C. because it’s an emergency to quell protests and fight crime. He can ask the Supreme Court for emergency rulings because we can’t afford to wait for judges to debate his policies.

Even when Trump doesn’t declare a legal emergency, he describes crises that justify dramatic action: Foreign aid is so woke and wasteful that we should end it altogether. The vaccine advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was so beholden to drug companies that its members had to be fired en masse.

It feels dizzying. Just how urgent are these crises, and who gets to decide?

For an essay The Times published this morning, I wanted to catalog Trump’s emergencies — both the legal ones and the rhetorical ones — to explore how he is using them to remake the government.

The law

Unlike several other nations, the United States doesn’t have a broad emergency provision that lets its leader suspend rights and laws. But a web of statutes gives the president emergency powers in specific instances.

• The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 empowers him to quickly deport foreigners during a war or an invasion — but doesn’t define what an invasion is. Trump’s Homeland Security Department has said it is battling an invasion by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang.

• U.S. law under Title X lets the president deploy the National Guard domestically to enforce federal law. Trump sent troops to Los Angeles because, he said, protesters had endangered federal buildings and immigration officers.

• The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 says the president can take action against an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Trump imposed new tariffs on dozens of countries because he said the U.S. trade deficit presented such a threat, though it is not new.

• A local law in Washington, D.C., lets the president take over the police force in a “crime emergency” — even though crime has fallen.

Judges must now decide whether Trump’s emergencies are genuine. They’re generally bad at this. “It’s striking how little policing of bad faith courts do,” says David Pozen, a constitutional expert at Columbia Law School. “They’re working with limited precedent, vague statutory language and a tradition of deference to the executive branch, all of which potentially cut in Trump’s favor.” In this way, the president has immense power to define reality.