By now everyone understands that the second Trump administration is going to be characterized by unprecedented assertions of presidential power aimed at radical policy goals far beyond anything your average 2024 Trump voter imagined (unless they read Project 2025 documents closely and ignored the candidate’s disavowals of them). It’s also been obvious for a while that the 47th president’s control of his party is considerably firmer than it was when he took office as the 45th president. This latter development is essential to the success of the former, so it’s worth paying attention to signs of intra-Republican rebellion against Trump 2.0 where they exist.
At the moment, they simply don’t, at least in any public way.
Perhaps the least surprising token of total surrender to the more radical impulses Trump is displaying is that the people he is putting in charge of federal agencies are treating their new fiefdoms like enemy territory to be plundered and pillaged rather than as platforms for good government. Thus they are showing considerable hospitality to the explicitly lawless raiders of DOGE. In a February 9 interview with CNN, freshly minted Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had to be reminded she is now a government employee her own self:
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Noem said that President Donald Trump had “authorized” Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team to gain access to DHS’ network, adding that she was “absolutely” comfortable with that….
The Musk-led DOGE team has attempted accessing government data from other federal agencies as it tries to root out what it deems wasteful spending — efforts that have raised privacy concerns and prompted a flurry of lawsuits.
“Well, we can’t trust our government anymore,” Noem told CNN’s Dana Bash in defending DOGE’s access to the data system.
Reminded by Bash that she and her agency are part of the government, Noem replied, “Yes, that’s what I’m saying, is that the American people now are saying that we have had our personal information shared, and out there in the public.”
Similarly over-the-top remarks about DOGE having carte blanche to do whatever Elon Musk and his troll army at X want have emanated from other new Trump Cabinet officers, notably the Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth, as he told Fox News in his signature dust-on-his-boots rhetoric:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is welcoming Elon Musk’s DOGE into the agency to streamline processes and “cut tail to put it to tooth,” he said Sunday on the Fox News Channel.
“We know in a world where America’s $37 trillion in debt, resources will not be unlimited, so every dollar we can find that isn’t being spent wisely is one we can put toward a warfighter, so we welcome DOGE at DOD,” he told “Sunday Morning Futures” anchor Maria Bartiromo.
The first time a Trump executive-branch appointee publicly objects to DOGE running wild, if it ever happens, will be a moment to note as significant. You have to assume most if not all of them are privately appalled, or would at least like to try their own hand at efficiency measures before turning everything over to Musk’s Geek Kiddie Corps. Yet as my colleague Chas Danner has calculated, DOGE now has some presence in 17 federal agencies without a peep of protest from their leaderships.
It’s also likely that the same split between public and private postures is common among legislative-branch Republicans as well. The submissive depths to which House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole is regularly descending are literally incredible. Check out this Cole reaction (per Punchbowl News) to the double-barreled DOGE and OMB usurpation of the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution:
“Any CEO that could spend less money than the board had voted for would get a bonus at the end of the year. He wouldn’t be yelled at because, ‘My God, you didn’t spend everything we wanted to.’ So again, I recognize there’s constitutional imperative here, there’s litigation, but I consider this well within the normal bounds of the executive and the legislative branch. … This doesn’t mark an imperial presidency. To me, it’s the mark of a strong president.”
Now you have to appreciate that Cole is a career politician who has just won the gavel to chair the House Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful posts in the federal government. It would not be a surprise to learn that all congressional appropriators take a secret oath to protect their turf with their last breath, so zealous have they been over the years in resisting any sort of encroachments. Yet Cole is cheerfully (in public, at least) welcoming the evisceration of his own, his committee’s, and his branch of government’s fundamental powers.
If you look closely you can see some potential fault lines in the congressional GOP ranks that could deepen if Trump’s agenda results in radical reductions in federal programs and benefits that affect constituents tangibly. A good example is the tonal difference in reactions from Alabama’s two Republican senators to fresh threats to hammer National Institutes of Health funding of medical research facilities that are a big deal in their state, as Al.com reports:
Alabama’s junior U.S. senator said she will work with President Donald Trump’s health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to “ensure our nation remains at the forefront” of innovation, research and care after funding cuts announced Friday night by the National Institutes of Health….
The University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Alabama in Huntsville are examples of the state institutions that could be affected by the cuts.
UAB alone has received more than a billion dollars in NIH funding in recent years.
Britt, you see, is a savvy longtime congressional staffer whose longtime boss, Senator Richard Shelby, was a major purveyor of federal pork. So without publicly rebelling against the budget-cutting furor in the Trump administration, she’s signaling she’ll work to protect her state’s federal dollars. Her Senate colleague, though, the hammer-headed MAGA warrior Tommy Tuberville, is just saluting:
“When the American people voted for President Trump on Nov. 5th, they voted for his campaign promise to create the Department of Government Efficiency and cut waste in the federal government,“ Tuberville said. ”I am 100% supportive of DOGE and Elon Musk.”
As the Trump-Musk-Vought agenda of domestic budget cuts becomes more specific, the public backlash will most definitely deepen, and at that point the fragile GOP margins in both congressional chambers could begin to matter. If and when Republican complaints go public, we’ll know we are in a potentially different phase of the second Trump administration.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that to reduce the risk of problems in Congress, Team Trump will continue to press unilateral executive actions that bypass the legislative branch entirely, in which case a new and much murkier question will be in order: How much loyalty do Trump-appointed members of the judicial branch have to their creator, particularly if he tramples precedents wantonly? That could be the ballgame.
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