The lawsuit filed last week to halt the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development stands on a bedrock constitutional principle: “Congress, not the President or the U.S. Constitution, creates and organizes the offices and departments” of the government—as a 2017 Heritage Foundation report accurately stated.

Good-faith arguments exist both for and against America having an independent USAID, or—to name another Donald Trump target—a stand-alone federal Department of Education. Over the decades, Congress has changed its mind about both. Constitutionally, however, that’s the point: The decision is up to Congress. Unilateral moves to dismantle USAID, to mothball the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or, if Trump’s advisers have their way, to disassemble the Education Department are beyond the president’s constitutional authority.

Since the Kennedy administration, foreign-assistance functions have been lodged in different agency homes. With authority granted him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a division of the State Department. Using powers delegated to him by statutes enacted in 1979, President Jimmy Carter moved USAID’s functions to the United States International Development Cooperation Agency. In 1998, Congress gave President Bill Clinton authority to either return USAID to the State Department or allow it to become an independent establishment within the executive branch; Clinton did the latter. Although presidential judgment thus informed the shape of USAID at every stage of its evolution, everything that presidents pre-Trump did with regard to the structure of USAID or the allocation of its functions was done pursuant to laws that Congress had enacted. No president asserted authority independent of Congress to create, reshape, or eliminate USAID.

This history reflects the Framers’ decision to give Congress, not the president, the authority to generate the executive-organization chart. The Constitution’s executive-branch charter, Article II, envisions what we now call the federal bureaucracy. The president is given explicit authority to “require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” But Article II says nothing else about those “departments.” Instead, Article I of the Constitution, the charter for the legislative branch, assigns to Congress the responsibility to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution … all … powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law, but law—including law that establishes and structures executive offices and agencies—gets made by Congress.

[Read: The other fear of the founders]

Since the very first Congress, the legislative branch has jealously guarded its power over organization. When the first House bill creating the Department of Foreign Affairs was introduced in the Senate, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania suggested that the organization of the executive branch might be left to the president, as the holder of executive power. His scheme would have given to the president the power of a British monarch to create offices. The Senate rejected his position, and the First Congress enacted a round of statutes organizing the new departments—Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury. The statutory duties of the secretaries heading Foreign Affairs and War were largely to carry out presidential instructions; Congress recognized that Article II envisioned significant discretionary roles in foreign and military affairs for the president. The Treasury, however, was organized in detail. Not only did Congress assign the Treasury Secretary a significant number of specific legal duties, but it also created additional offices within the department—all requiring Senate advice and consent. These additional offices, as explained by the administrative-law scholar Jerry L. Mashaw, “were meant to provide checks on the Secretary and each other in the crucial matter of safeguarding the integrity of the fiscal and monetary affairs of the nation.” Congress went on to create a variety of other agencies, including the Mint, the Post Office, a Customs Service, and a national bank, tailoring the structure of each according to its sense of how best to fit structure to mission. No one doubted that this was Congress’s prerogative to decide.

Supreme Court jurisprudence recognized Congress’s role. In Myers v. United States, the 1926 Supreme Court decision most protective of broad presidential power over administration, Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft acknowledged: “To Congress under its legislative power is given the establishment of offices, the determination of their functions and jurisdiction, the prescribing of reasonable and relevant qualifications and rules of eligibility of appointees, and the fixing of the term for which they are to be appointed.” This proposition has never been open to serious question.

Congress has recognized, of course, that presidents may have valuable ideas regarding administrative organization. Beginning in 1939, Congress enacted a series of so-called Reorganization Acts, which gave presidents significant (but not unlimited) discretion to create, abolish, or restructure administrative agencies, subject to an important caveat. Presidential reorganization plans were subject to a “legislative veto”—that is, a resolution disapproving the plan enacted by both Houses of Congress, which could keep it from going into effect. This would be a concurrent resolution of the House and the Senate that the president could not veto and did not have to sign in order to make it binding. Through the threat of legislative vetoes, Congress kept control over what got created, abolished, or restructured.

In 1983, however, the Supreme Court held that legislative vetoes were an unconstitutional form of legislation. As a result, Congress took away presidential authority to implement reorganizations unilaterally. If presidential reorganization plans could not easily be blocked, Congress would no longer authorize them. Since 1984, presidents have been allowed only to propose reorganizations, which Congress could enact or reject through the ordinary legislative process. (A suggestion in 2023 by Vivek Ramaswamy that a 1977 Reorganization Act continues to empower presidents to abolish agencies despite the statutory changes Congress enacted in 1984 is an appallingly fanciful statutory interpretation.)

[Read: The Constitutional crisis is here]

In light of this legal background, the question is why Trump thinks a president can legally disassemble agencies on his own—assuming, that is, that he cares if it is legal. The likely answer would involve an especially ambitious version of an Article II interpretation called the “unitary executive theory.” The baseline premise of the unitary executive theory is that Article II guarantees presidents complete removal authority over every subordinate member of the executive branch. Bolder versions contend that he or she can also directly command how every function of the executive branch be performed—or even perform them personally.

The Supreme Court has never fully embraced the unitary executive theory. However, a broad reading of the Myers decision mentioned earlier—a reading the Court unanimously rejected seven years later—would invalidate any attempt by Congress to create independent administrators protected from presidential at-will removal. The Roberts Court has gone nearly all in on the broad reading of Myers, treating Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 opinion upholding the Federal Trade Commission, as a mere exception to Myers. (In the intervening decades, the Supreme Court had repeatedly reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor as the controlling authority, most famously in its 1988 decision upholding the constitutionality of post-Watergate independent counsels.) As a result, the constitutionality of agency structures such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board now hangs by a thread; the Court could conceivably uphold the firing of the NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

Of course, even a presidential power to fire an individual agency head would not necessarily translate into authority to shut down entire government departments. However, in its 2024 opinion granting former presidents all-but-blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, the Court seemed to signal something far more ominous. The majority described the president’s authority to supervise the executive branch as a power that Congress may not touch—a conclusion that flies in the face of constitutional text. As explained by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who had headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during part of George W. Bush’s second administration: “The ruling about the exclusivity of presidential enforcement discretion, especially vis-à-vis Congress, is entirely novel … And it has potentially massive implications, depending on its scope.” What the opinion now apparently implies to Trump is that the president, constitutionally speaking, is the entirety of the executive branch, and he can configure it however he wants.

That said, Trump’s record of legal success in the Supreme Court is a mixed one. But he presumably thinks it a good bet either that the legal challenges to his scorched-earth tactics will be too slow to stop him or that, if they reach the Supreme Court, that body’s right-wing supermajority will continue to improvise on behalf of de facto executive supremacy. Eyeing the latter possibility, the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has affirmed the administration’s position that Congress lacks authority to force the spending of appropriated funds—a position the Supreme Court has never endorsed, and which is constitutionally unfounded. But a majority that would proceed as vigorously and creatively as it did to protect Trump from prosecution might be willing to improvise some more.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

A government agency’s structure and location are not just abstract; they matter to the work the agency does on the ground. When Congress extracted a Department of Education from what was formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it was to give federal support for education greater emphasis. When Congress moved the Coast Guard from Transportation to Homeland Security, it was presumably to prioritize the Coast Guard’s role in security rather than safety. The reason proposals to merge the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service have always failed is that the organizational DNA of the Interior Department, which houses BLM, favors conservation, whereas the reflexive policy mood of the Agriculture Department, which owns the Forest Service, is pro-development.

Perhaps the most worrying development is that the administration’s commitment to obeying court orders may not prove any more reliable than its dedication to following statutes. On Sunday, with a soupçon of Trumpian deniability in his precise wording, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Taken literally, Vance’s statement is accurate; what it fails to acknowledge is that the judicial power includes authority to state just how far the executive’s legitimate power extends. In rejecting President Richard Nixon’s claim of entitlement to withhold the Watergate tapes, the Court held in a unanimous opinion: “Many decisions of this Court … have unequivocally reaffirmed the [1803] holding of Marbury v. Madison that ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” Should Trump ignore any court order to halt his demolition of the executive branch, he will have dismantled not just an agency, but the Constitution itself.

In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.

Given American conservatives’ recent rhetoric, their surrender to Musk’s vision of utopia is discordant, to say the least. Ever since the pandemic, the MAGA movement has decried the tyranny of a cabal of self-certain experts, who wield their technical knowledge unaccountably. But even as the right purports to loathe technocracy, it has empowered an engineer to radically remake the American state in the name of efficiency.

Trumpists might be surprised to know that they are fulfilling a dream first conceived by a 19th-century French crank, Henri de Saint-Simon. A utopian polymath who fought in the American Revolution and claimed to be a descendant of Charlemagne, he imagined a society in which engineers and industrial managers usurped the aristocracy at the top of the pecking order. The ruling cadre of engineers, he theorized, wouldn’t just solve social and economic problems, but serve as high priests, guiding society to efficiency, progress, and harmony. Technocracy and spirituality were intertwined in his doctrine, which he called the “New Christianity.”

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

In the last years of his life, Saint-Simon struggled to find a publisher for his books. His despair led him to shoot himself seven times in the head, a failed suicide attempt. Only after his death, in 1825, did he win cultlike devotion; his wider influence became unmistakable. Scholars dubbed him the “father of socialism,” and his veneration of the engineer ricocheted through the history of the left, especially in its faith in centralized planning. “Master technology,” Stalin famously implored his followers. “It is time that the Bolsheviks become experts.” (Eventually, Stalin murdered and imprisoned those who followed this command.)

The worship of the engineer is not confined to any single strain of ideology. It’s a modern impulse, and even ardent critics of the state have fallen victim to it. In Atlas Shrugged, every high-school libertarian’s favorite novel, Ayn Rand’s heroic protagonist, John Galt, is an engineer whose solitary capacity for invention and heterodox thinking make him a sort of über-mensch. And there are hints of this same heroic self-conception in the right-wing swatches of present-day Silicon Valley. Engineers are prophets of a new order because they promise inventions that will usher in the purest expressions of freedom: realms (cryptocurrency, space colonies) that are beyond the reach of the state.

One pivotal figure in American political history briefly embodied the noblest aspirations for technocracy—President Herbert Hoover, nicknamed the Great Engineer. After training at Stanford, he made a fortune in the mining business. Hoover believed ardently in scientific management: Any procedure could be simplified through studying the data. By monitoring workers, the engineer could cull waste from the productive process. Born a Quaker, Hoover delivered lyrical descriptions of his life’s work, which aren’t so far from Saint-Simon’s faith. Where other occupations were “parasitic,” in Hoover’s view, the engineer was the handmaiden of a humane social order because he “elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy] democracy

At his best, Hoover’s technocratic skills were something to behold. He was a genius at orchestrating responses to catastrophes; his coordination of food and supply shipments in Europe during World War I became the basis for his political mystique. Progressives were so enamored of his work that they desperately hoped he would run for president as a Democrat, so that they could preside over a new era of rational, well-organized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fan before he became a foe, tried and failed to draft Hoover to run as his party’s standard-bearer in 1920.

Elected as a Republican in 1928, Hoover was in the White House when the nation’s economy collapsed. History regards him with disdain, less for his policies than for his distinct lack of warmth and his disregard for human suffering. He treated food distribution as an engineering problem, yet he never managed to describe victims with compassion. According to his biographer Joan Hoff Wilson, “They all became statistics—by the same impersonal scientific engineering approach and temperament that was to shock and dismay his fellow Americans during the Great Depression and erode his political credibility with them.”

The problem with applying scientific management to the government is its hollow heart, as the former auto executive Robert McNamara later showed to horrifying effect. As the secretary of defense, he presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, deploying a data-driven approach that rendered casualties in the vernacular of statistics. (McNamara didn’t train as an engineer, but he self-consciously employed the mindset.) In his enthusiasm for optimization and efficiency, he paid no heed to the terrible human toll of his immaculate systems.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

In a far more benign way, Jimmy Carter, the only other engineer to become president, struggled to form human connections with the public. As the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker put it, he used an “engineer’s approach of devising ‘comprehensive’ programs on this subject or that, but repeatedly failed to mobilize public opinion in their support.” Carter’s brain was ill-equipped to process the irrationality of politics.

Despite this history of failure, Americans haven’t shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can’t. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too.

But in his short stay in Washington, Musk has already evinced the same moral shortcoming that afflicted Hoover and McNamara, the same inability to calculate the costs of cruelty. He has casually paused global aid programs that alleviate suffering; he has moved to destroy bureaucrats’ careers without concern for the rippling personal consequences. He has done this with an arrogance suffused with the spiritual self-certainity of Saint-Simon’s priestly caste of engineers. To a brain as rational as Musk’s, democracy is waste and inefficiency. The best system is the one bursting forth from his mind.