Hi, I’m Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of politics, science, and security, and I’m filling in for Jake this week.
On August 7, the White House issued an executive order giving political appointees authority over federal grant-making. This made the nonpartisan experts who have long decided how agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation direct funds subordinate to, well, commissars.
Nestled in the order was a phrase that’s become increasingly familiar to me over the past seven months as I’ve read piles of boring documents issuing from the administration, trying to figure out what it’s doing.
“Discretionary awards must, where applicable,” it read, “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
This phrase, and variants, come up a lot. It has popped up everywhere from the White House’s description of the Office of Presidential Scheduling (it works to “create an agenda that strategically advances the President’s priorities,” apparently) to a website where the Coast Guard explains that its secretary is assigned to “fully align the Service to execute the President’s priorities.”
“It’s become a sort of all-purpose catchphrase from this administration,” says Zachary Price, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, “and they’re also particularly assertive about claiming this power of the unitary executive branch to direct how different agencies perform their functions. So it fits into the general style of this administration, of wanting pretty strong top-down control.”
Examples abound. A February executive order, for instance, said that going forward, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would “review independent regulatory agencies' obligations for consistency with the President's policies and priorities.” An April memo from the acting administrator of the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) offering guidance to bureaucrats at affected agencies on implementing the order explains what happens when a significant regulatory action is submitted to OIRA for review: “Executive Branch reviewers review the materials for consistency with the President’s priorities, adherence to statutory requirements, and analytic cohesion.”
What exactly the president’s priorities are go unstated; the emphasis the president’s paper pushers put on them, though, raises questions about what happens when they conflict with those of others—including the authors of the Constitution.
The Importance of Showerheads
Talk about the president’s priorities certainly didn’t originate with President Donald Trump. His predecessors, including in the Biden and Obama administrations, used the phrase, and setting priorities for the part of the federal government they oversee is a central part of the president’s job.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t something new in the expansive use of the phrase and its variants, though, or that there aren’t issues with defining the job of officials throughout the executive branch as intuiting the priorities of a man who on a given day may be focusing on the Cracker Barrel logo, Roger Clemens’ Hall of Fame case, or his long-standing feud with Rosie O’Donnell.
“Agencies like the Coast Guard have a strategic priority-setting process,” says Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “It isn’t normally a bunch of officials sitting around and wondering what the president thinks today. It’s a really weird instruction.”
“You can’t just be free to do anything because he says, ‘That’s a priority of mine,’” says Freeman. “That’s not how agencies work. They can only act pursuant to law.”
This isn’t a theoretical issue. Daniel Walters, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, points to an April executive order addressing acceptable water pressure in showerheads—an apparent policy priority of Trump’s—and purporting to repeal a definition issued by the Department of Energy in 2021. Normally, this would require a process defined in the Administrative Procedure Act; this was unnecessary, though, Trump wrote in the order, “because I am ordering the repeal.” (“Kind of a different way of phrasing the ‘aligned with the president’s priorities’ line,” says Walters.) And the definition was in fact rescinded without following the usual procedure.
If this were challenged, Walters says, “a court would essentially be charged with deciding whether it’s enough for the agency to ignore a law like the Administrative Procedure Act on the basis of nothing more than ‘We lack discretion because the president told us to do it.’”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about what executive branch officials are supposed to do when the president’s priorities come into conflict with the law or the Constitution.
The Waiting Game
The president’s priorities aren’t always adduced in the context of legal instruction; often they’re brought up as a sort of rhetorical flourish, or authority to be cited, even where they’re seemingly entirely superfluous.
In an attachment to a May letter outlining the proposed discretionary budget, for example, OMB director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought used the phrase to explain why the administration wanted to do everything from cancel contributions to the African Development Fund—“not currently aligned to Administration priorities”—to eliminate funding for purportedly wasteful grants and contracts, “including those not aligned with the Administration’s priorities,” at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality—which, it is noted, published information “wholly unrelated to MAHA” under the prior administration.
With the odd exception (“NIH research would align with the President’s priorities to address chronic disease”), there isn’t much about what the priorities of the president or the administration actually are. It’s not difficult, though, to infer what they’re not, both from this document—“The Budget also reduces funding levels for the HHS Office of Minority Health and Office on Women’s Health to promote efficiency and invest in areas that align with Administration priorities”—and others, like a Health and Human Services budget document listing dozens of programs to be eliminated to “align investments with the Administration’s priorities.” (The White House did not answer a question about what the administration’s priorities are, if the areas of the health of women and minorities conflict with them.)
The purpose of an assertion of power can be simply to assert power, and it’s not difficult to see the utility of doing so.
“Sometimes there’s real power in saying the same thing over and over again. It’s almost hypnotic,” says Walters. “I think it could be effective at convincing people generally that the president has more authority than we thought.”
Certainly, at least some members of Congress seem convinced. The House Ways and Means Committee proclaimed in May that it was marking up a proposed budget bill in accordance with presidential priorities—those being, in its understanding, to “restore and expand Trump-era growth and relief for families, workers, and small businesses,” as well as removing taxes on tips and overtime pay and “additional relief for America’s seniors.”
In April, senator Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican, wrote his weekly column on the theme of “unlocking the president’s priorities,” which he took to be “secure the border, restore American strength, and unleash American energy.”
Will the president’s priorities, whatever they are, become those of the government, and the nation? Price, taking a long view, believes that the judiciary has offered more of a counterbalance to ever-expanding claims of presidential power than the doom-inclined may credit it for. (“Courts have seemed to grow steadily more powerful and self-confident,” he says, “particularly when it comes to reviewing administrative actions.”) For Freeman, though, the matter is open.
“You and I can talk about all the legal constraints on agencies, how our system creates all of these constraints, the Constitution, the laws, the funding from Congress—there are all sorts of levers,” she says. “But if nobody is enforcing the constraints, if Congress doesn’t do anything, if the courts pretty much roll over, then all that law didn’t amount to much, did it? And we’re waiting to see what really happens.”
This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
