Stalemate continues in Congress over how to next mitigate the lingering economic pain inflicted by the coronavirus shutdown. Nearly all House members and senators publicly agree on the need to provide assistance to those impacted by this economic crisis. Yet, despite almost six months of discussion, legislation remains elusive.
President Trump has identified similar concerns and repeatedly expressed support for additional aid. And because of the lack of congressional action, he has aggressively explored an array of possible executive actions linked to existing statutory authority.
Much of this authority granted by Congress is either expansive or vaguely defined. Since our nation's founding, presidents have tested its outer limits. In response, Congress has often shirked its constitutional mandate to check the president from exceeding these limits. In addition, over the decades Congress has proactively ceded large swaths of its responsibilities to the executive branch. As a result, the executive branch wields power unimagined by the Founders.
Recent executive orders on payroll tax deferments, unemployment compensation and eviction moratoriums highlight the importance of restoring the balance of power envisioned by our founders. Our Constitution gives Congress the ultimate power to levy taxes, allocate spending and create law. The executive branch, headed by the president, bears the responsibility of faithfully executing those laws.
Earlier this year, Congress granted businesses leeway to defer until the end of 2022 the employer portion of the Social Security tax owed on the remainder of this year's wages. However, Congress chose not to defer the taxes for the employee portion. So Trump issued an executive order suspending collection of the employee portion for the rest of the year.
Regardless of desired economic outcome, the president lacks clear statutory authority to suspend collection of the tax in this manner.
Furthermore, most businesses are hesitant to transmit deferred taxes to employees. After all, employers still must remit these taxes, albeit at a delayed date. When the IRS bill comes due, they will be forced to withhold these deferred taxes from the paychecks of their workers.
The attempt to alter tax policy through executive order has frustrated the administration's desire to provide workers with a boost in take-home pay during the economic uncertainty.
Next, consider the state of federal unemployment benefits. The end of July marked the expiration of a weekly boost of $600 that had been provided since March under the last recovery package, known as the CARES Act. Ever since, Congress has failed to enact additional aid to the more than 11 million made jobless during the pandemic.
To lessen the blow, Trump issued an executive order directing that as much as $44 billion in the disaster aid reserves of the Federal Emergency Management Agency be used to provide $300 weekly in benefits (matched with $100 state payments) to anyone eligible for jobless insurance under the CARES Act. These funds were depleted in less than two months.
The president only embarked on this novel approach following Congress's failure to find a legislative solution. Unfortunately, the executive order sets a precedent of unilaterally declaring a federal emergency and then using that emergency to redirect appropriations.
Trump's third big move was on eviction moratoriums. He issued an executive order protecting all residents of rental properties until the end of the year. This order was predicated on the Public Health Services Act , which authorizes regulations "necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the states or possessions, or from one state or possession into any other." Examples listed in the law include "inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures."
So what legal rationale links an eviction moratorium to this authority? The clearest connection seems to be this part of the order: "Eviction moratoria — like quarantine, isolation, and social distancing — can be an effective public health measure utilized to prevent the spread of communicable disease."
But is a ban on evictions related to preventing the international or interstate spread of communicable diseases? Here are the facts: Total relocations in a typical year far exceed the number of evictions experienced even in the depths of the Great Recession at the end of the last decade. Then, the number of evictions failed to top 1 million households annually — or fewer than 2.5 million individuals. In contrast, more than 30 million Americans moved from one location to another last year in a healthy economy.
A blanket moratorium that fails to target a tenant's underlying health condition or coronavirus symptoms strays far from the express intent of the law Trump cited. Even the order itself hints the ban is meant as an economic relief measure, not a tool to protect the public from the spread of disease. For instance, the moratorium excludes people not in poverty or otherwise able to pay their rent.
In the midst of the current economic storm, the president's desire to help revive the economy and give relief to Americans who continue to suffer is understandable. And given the lack of action by a dysfunctional and politically divided Congress, it's understandable Trump is pursuing alternative approaches to alleviate the economic pain.
But our system of government, including enumerated powers and separation of powers, requires each branch to stay in its assigned lane. Creating economic policy through executive order threatens a further encroachment of the executive branch upon the legislative branch.
Reversing this long-term trend requires Congress to reassert its responsibility to legislate — and for the executive branch to once again focus on executing the law as written.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.