In his first six weeks since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has issued dozens of executive orders, impounded funding for several major programs and agencies, and empowered Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to fire thousands of federal workers.
Trump supporters, including Republicans in Congress, have embraced the changes, saying he is following through on his campaign promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington.
But Democrats, many legal experts, and affected groups are alarmed by what they say is an overreach of power, and are seeking redress in the courts.
Among them is Neal Katyal ’91, former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and a leading litigator at Millbank, an international law firm. On March 1, Katyal, who was in town for Board of Trustees meetings, joined U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., for a talk in the Hayward Room of the Hanover Inn about the legal implications and real-world impacts of Trump’s recent actions.
The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy’s Roger S. Aaron ’64 lecture, co-sponsored by the Dartmouth College Democrats and the Dartmouth Law Journal, was moderated by Dafna Linzer, editorial director and executive vice president at U.S. News & World Report.
Linzer began by asking Welch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, for his perspective “on the spate of executive orders, many of which have already been challenged in court or appear to disregard Congressional oversight powers.”
“The president has been on a lawless rampage,” Welch responded. “He ran on the economy, he ran on the border. And what has happened is that the president has torn up the Constitution.”
Welch also excoriated Republican members of Congress who either explicitly or tacitly support Trump’s directives.
“I’ve seen nothing, ever, like this, where you’ve got the president basically running roughshod over Congressional authority, and where you have an acquiescence on the part of many of my colleagues that he’s invading the separate and coequal function of Congress. And then you have the threats from the vice president that if the court makes an order that the president doesn’t like, let them enforce it. So this is very serious,” Welch said.
Katyal agreed, saying that while there is nothing wrong with the concept of issuing executive orders, which presidents have done “in time immemorial,” the content of an order can be unconstitutional. For example, he said, mass firings of career civil servants sidestep legal protections such as the Merit Systems Protection Board, established by Congress to adjudicate disputes of federal employees.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, they’re all set up in this way. Now the Supreme Court, in a case in 1935 called Humphrey’s Executor, really a landmark case, said the Federal Trade Commission is constitutional and that a president can’t just fire a member of that commission without reason, because Congress put in what we call ‘for cause’ protection. That means you can’t fire someone without good cause,” Katyal said.
Katyal is mounting a legal challenge on that basis, but Trump’s acting solicitor general is arguing for a reversal of the Humphrey’s Executor decision. Katyal expects this and other seminal cases relating to the separation of powers to reach the Supreme Court.
Linzer noted that several of those legal challenges are aimed at sweeping workforce and budget cuts being made by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Trump and Musk have said they are trying to root out waste, fraud, and inefficiencies in the federal government.
“The reality here is that Trump has a cabinet of one,” Welch said. “Musk is in charge. The heads of other agencies are having to accommodate him and his DOGE team and they’re making decisions about terminating people in these agencies.”
While Welch said stamping out waste and fraud in government was a worthwhile goal, he said that the Trump administration is taking the wrong approach.
“It has nothing to do with trying to get functional improvement,” he said, citing the near-elimination of the U.S. Agency of International Development, or USAID. “That was an early target, because a lot of folks don’t know what USAID is. A lot of folks think it’s 25% of our budget. It’s less than 1%. You have the employees who’ve been there in many cases, 10 or 15 or 20 years, having security people show up in Washington at their desk and telling them they have 15 minutes to remove their belongings and they’re escorted out of the building.”
Nor, Katyal lamented, is Congress doing anything to stop Musk from carrying out Trump’s orders.
“When you have both houses of Congress with the same political party as the president, you generally have weaker checks. And here you effectively have none,” he said, turning to Welch. “I mean, as best as I can tell, your colleagues have totally abandoned their role as a check on the president.”
Welch agreed. But Katyal predicted Trump might respond to pressure from a different source, if his tariffs on foreign goods, among other policies, trigger an economic crisis.
“It’s probably the stock market. It’s probably when the market goes down. And you know, maybe that will provide a check, but we can’t rely on Congress. We can only sometimes rely on the courts, ” Katyal said.
Katyal disputed the view held by some that the Supreme Court “is basically in Trump’s pocket,” recalling that in 2020, Trump lost “many times on all those crazy election cases he brought. They were crazy. So I don’t want to put too much emphasis on it, but it ruled against Trump on executive power 8-to-1 when the January 6th commission tried to get access to records.”
Looking ahead, Katyal thinks the Supreme Court will also foil Trump’s attempt to deny U.S. citizenship for children born to immigrants without documentation, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
“What if the president decides not to comply with a court order?” Linzer read from a list of questions students submitted in advance.
“Well, I’m not at all confident that he’ll follow them,” said Welch. “So we’ve got J.D. Vance saying, ‘Let the courts enforce it.’ ”
Courts don’t have their own enforcement authority, Katyal said, and even though there is a statute that requires marshals to enforce federal court orders, he called that scenario “ a slender reed on which to put our hopes.”
Meanwhile, “Trump is trying to flood the zone, both in the policy world, foreign and domestic, as well as the courts,” Katyal said. “He’s throwing so much stuff at our minds, at our courts, our judges, that not all of it can be stopped, even if the courts are performing their role vigorously. So that’s why, at the end of the day it’s elections that matter.”
More than 1,200 people have watched the livestream of the event.
After the discussion, Holland Bald ’25 took some comfort in the prospect that voters may be able to re-shape the future. He also found a few other “nuggets of optimism” in the otherwise somber conversation.
“It was interesting to hear Neal talk about the different cases that he thinks that litigators are likely to win against the Trump administration. In particular, birthright citizenship was not one that I was particularly optimistic about, especially given some of the outcomes that we’ve seen from the Supreme Court,” Bald said.
Katie Carpenter ’28 said while there is cause for concern about the future, she is going to try to avoid sinking into pessimism and paralysis.
“I think it is very easy to see the magnitude of all the headlines and media that capture attention in so many different ways that you can’t follow through on all those issues,” she said. “It’s important for progressive candidates and constituents to remain realistic about the gravity of the situation of the Trump administration, but also not fall into doomerism.”