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Presidents of the United States start wars, move markets, and can instantly change the lives of 340 million Americans, not to mention lives in other countries. But if America was basically founded to get away from a king, why does this one person now wield so much power? It turns out it wasn't supposed to be like this.
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So today, the office of the President here is way more powerful than anybody who wrote the Constitution intended or expected. If the framers of the Constitution came back today, they say, well, wait a minute, we didn't create this. Where'd that one come from? Where did that come from?
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Where it came from and how that happened is a story that spans 250 years, a story of a long list of presidents using crises to push the limits of what the job actually was. Helping us untangle this expansion of power is Professor H.W. brands, a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist and American Presidential Historian. I'm Soni Kassam and this is 1440 Explorers, the show where we dive into things everyone hears about but nobody fully understands. Stay with us.
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Listen. Learning has never been harder. The Internet is overwhelmed with low quality content, clickbait with little substance, AI generated slop and opinions masquerading as facts. Curious people like you are left sifting through noise instead of finding what matters. Enter 1440 topics. We've curated the highest quality resources from across the Internet, Think data, visualizations, captivating videos, long form journalism, and paired them with staff written overviews to make every subject easy to understand and explore. Want to learn about venture capital or how new weight loss drugs work? Do you keep reading about CRISPR but are missing the best 101 on the breakthrough technology? Find all of this and so much more at join140.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
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It's a clear Washington, D.C. morning in 2026, and you're on the official 1440 Magic School Bus tour of the White House. You clear the Secret Service checkpoint, get waved past the ropes, and start shuffling through the hallways and polished rooms. It feels like exactly what you expected. Portraits. Chandeliers. But the closer you get to the West Wing, the stranger the place starts to feel. Because this isn't really a house. It's the front office of the largest executive operation on Earth. As you scurry along with your class, you start noticing who's around you. A military aide carrying nuclear codes. Two White House lawyers reviewing the language of an executive order. And beyond the walls around you is the government made up of 15 cabinet departments, hundreds of agencies, more than 2 million civilian employees, and about 1.3 million active duty troops. All of it, every person in every office, and a chain of command flowing up toward one single person, the President of the United States. As you reach the Oval Office, you think to yourself, the room is smaller than you expected. It's full of history. But it also sort of looks like a nice, ish hotel suite. Then, without warning and breaking protocol that says he can't be there during fantasy tours, the President walks in. And that's the moment the tension at the heart of the presidency really lands, because this is just one single person. And yet today, the job asks that person to have three massive roles at once. The first is head of state. He's the national symbol, the voice meant to stand in for the country itself. The second is head of government, the executive in charge of the sprawling federal apparatus that writes rules, enforces laws, and responds to disasters. And the third is commander in chief, the civilian who sits at the very top of the military chain of command. So packed into this one office is an extraordinary amount of power. Ceremonial power, administrative power, and military power. It's one of the most concentrated positions of executive power on earth. And that is what makes the whole thing so ironic, because the nation's founders feared concentrated power more than anything. Remember, they had just fought a revolution against a king. Here's Professor H.W. brands.
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The people who wrote the Constitution were distrustful of people in power. And they believed that power tended to corrupt the individuals who held power. That the only way to limit power, to check power, was, was to put another base of power in constant tension and competition with that one.
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So when they built a new government, they designed one that was split three ways, each checking the other from getting too powerful. Congress makes the laws and controls the money. The courts interpret the law, and the President enforces the laws and runs the executive branch. Okay, you may be thinking here. If concentrated power was the thing they feared most, why build an executive at all? Turns out, before writing the Constitution, America had tried something different. Under the Articles of Confederation, the country's first Constitution, there was no president at all, no executive branch, just a Congress of delegates from 13 states trying to run a country by committee. And the results were a hot mess. That's because Congress had no executive to enforce its laws, and so it could make decisions all day long. But nobody listened. So the founders didn't just fear concentrated power. They had also lived through the chaos of too little of it. The Constitution was their attempt to thread that needle enough executive Authority to actually govern, but hemmed in on every side.
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The whole idea is to keep any individual or any small group of individuals from gaining too much power. Each one had to check the other.
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So this is why they divided the government into three branches. Congress, the courts, and the presidency, each designed to check the others. But the plot thickens here, because for all the concern about concentrated power, when the delegates gathered in the sweltering heat of Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the
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Constitution, they devoted three months to the powers of congress, and they devoted about three days to the powers of the presidency, largely because they looked across the room, they saw George Washington sitting there, and they said to themselves and to each other, let him figure it out when he becomes president.
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Yes, the framers wanted to restrain executive power, but they were also, consciously or not, designing the office around George Washington, a man whose defining political trait was restrained. He had taken power and then given it back. He had commanded an army and then submitted to civilian rule. That meant the presidency was being designed, at least in part, for someone the founders trusted not to abuse it. So article two ended up remarkably spare. It lays out a few core authorities, enforce the laws, command the military, make treaties, nominate judges and officials, and grant pardons. But beyond that, it leaves a lot unsaid. And so Washington began filling in the vast space left by Article 2. He established precedent after precedent from scratch. The inaugural address, the title Mr. President, the State of the union. He also pushed the boundaries of foreign policy, declaring American neutrality in the war between Britain and France.
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There's nothing in the constitution that says that presidents can proclaim neutrality, but there's nothing that says they can't. And he proclaimed it because pretty much everybody in the United States thought neutrality was a good idea. They said, okay, fine, and they didn't contest it.
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And in moves like that, you can see how the presidency began to take shape. The founders left the office constrained but not fully defined. And Washington, by virtue of being first, began setting the standards others would inherit. That is how the presidency grew through practice as much as text. The next great expansion of presidential power began, ironically, with a president who had long preached restraint. Thomas Jefferson firmly believed the president should do only what the constitution explicitly allowed. Then he became president and ran into a problem. France was suddenly willing to sell the Louisiana territory. The price was $15 million, and if Jefferson said yes, the United States would double in size. There was just one catch. The constitution didn't say the president could buy land from another country.
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And so Jefferson agonized over, well, I've been Saying you can't do what's not explicitly written in the Constitution. I really think we ought to purchase Louisiana that's not written in the Constitution. What am I going to do? Well, he did what other presidents would do later, and that is, he would modify his philosophy and make an exception. We will make an exception for this one, and I'll expand the powers of the president to purchase this territory.
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Jefferson even briefly considered asking for a constitutional amendment to authorize the purchase. But time was short and the deal might disappear. So instead, he made the decision and sent it to the Senate for approval. Jefferson's critics called him a hypocrite. He never responded to his critics, and the United States got Louisiana. That move established a template that presidents would reach for again and again, act first, justify later. If Jefferson stretched presidential power in a moment of opportunity, Lincoln expanded it in a moment of national survival.
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It's rare in history that a single individual holds the fate of a great nation like the United States, in his hands. But that was the case with Lincoln.
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When southern states began seceding in 1861, Lincoln could have let them go. Instead, he went to war to hold the Union together. He suspended habeas corpus, the centuries old right that prevents the government from imprisoning people without charge. It was a power that had never been exercised by any American president, and which, many argued only Congress could invoke. He also blockaded southern ports without a congressional declaration of war, essentially treating secession as a military conflict on his own authority. And in 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in Confederate states not through legislation, not through Congress, but by an order justified solely by his wartime powers as commander in chief.
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This was probably the single most important action by any president, because at a stroke of his pen, Effectively, it erased $4 billion of property value, the property that were invested in the slaves. No president has ever done anything like that. Absent the Civil War, he never would have been able to do that.
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After the war ended, Congress reasserted itself, and Lincoln's emergency powers receded. But not all the way, because the actions Lincoln took had shown what the presidency was capable of. And that knowledge didn't leave the office when the war did. It stayed there, dormant, waiting for the next crisis. By the early 20th century, the presidency was no longer defined only by domestic emergencies. As the United States grew richer and more powerful, the office itself began to stretch outward. And no president embodied that shift more clearly than Woodrow Wilson.
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Wilson was the first president actually to conceive that the United States ought to become a leader or the leader of the world. When Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany in 1917, he said we must go to war to make the world safe for democracy.
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What Wilson expanded was not just America's role in the world, but the President's role in defining it. He treated the office as the place where national purpose would be articulated first, publicly, forcefully, and often before Congress had fully caught up.
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Half the President's time today is spent on matters of foreign policy. And that is something that Congress, as a large committee, now 538members, is too unwieldy to engage in diplomacy, to take action.
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The presidency was acquiring something no other part of government could match. Speed, unity, and the ability to act before anyone else was ready. And Franklin D. Roosevelt would seize that opening and remake the office around it. That's after the break. Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.
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You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it.
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So my first reaction was, haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real?
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And I think we will see a twitch streamer President, maybe within our lifetimes.
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You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts. If Wilson expanded the presidency outward and Lincoln expanded it in crisis, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did both at the same time. When he took office in 1933, the country was in economic freefall. Banks were collapsing, unemployment was staggering, and millions of Americans were looking to the White House.
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Franklin Roosevelt said, you know, we need term users. We need a new deal between the American people and their government.
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He pushed Congress to create Social Security, unemployment insurance, and protections for the banking system. Things that required the government not just to legislate, but to administer. And to do that, he greatly expanded the executive branch, adding a ton of new agencies reporting to the President. That was Roosevelt's New Deal. When the economy failed, the federal government would catch you. But he also understood that building those programs was only half the job. Americans had to trust them, and that meant trusting him.
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Franklin Roosevelt was the first to realize there's this new communications technology, radio, that allows me to bypass the newspaper editors, the reporters and all that, and speak directly to the people. And so he instituted this habit, this practice that he called the fireside chats.
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He spoke softly into the microphone, just the president and some 60 million Americans in their living rooms in real time.
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My Friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking to talk with the comparatively.
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Then came the war.
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World War II is the biggest war, the most destructive war in human history, and therefore the role of the President, the role of the United States. The government of the United States expanded commensurately. The federal budget exploded During World War II, the American footprint overseas in the United States, the size of the American military, everything grew, each enormously during World War II. And the president is right at the middle of that.
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You can see it in Roosevelt's decisions. In 1940, with Britain running out of time, FDR didn't wait for the full legislative process to play out. He turned instead to executive action, direct orders from the President to the federal government. Using that power, Roosevelt sent Britain 50 aging US destroyers in exchange for rights to build American bases on British territory. Days later, he signed the first peacetime draft in American history, moving the country toward war before it was formally at war.
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The big growth occurred during and after World War II. In the 19th century, as commander in chief, the president might command 10,000 troops. In 1840, the president has commanded 2 million troops during most of the Cold War.
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By the time World War II ended in 1945, the United States had emerged as the dominant power in the world and the executive branch had grown almost beyond recognition. The CIA, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense. Alongside them were the domestic agencies Roosevelt built during the Depression, running programs millions of Americans had come to rely on, all of it housed inside the Executive branch, all of it ultimately answering to one person. And that changed the stakes of the presidency yet again. Because after World War II, America was no longer dealing with sporadic turmoil. It was living inside a permanent global confrontation. And now, for the first time, the President had a vast national security and domestic apparatus at his command to manage it. Which made one old constitutional limit start to look very fragile. The Constitution is explicit. Only Congress can declare war. For more than 160 years, that was the rule. But in 1950, when communist North Korea invaded South Korea, Harry Truman sent American troops into battle without asking Congress for a declaration of war. His argument was that in the nuclear age, waiting was too dangerous. And with the Soviet Union newly armed with the atomic bomb and communist expansion suddenly feeling immediate, Congress led him.
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The bedrock constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war was waived and has been ignored ever since. 1950, Congress basically said to the President, okay, you now decide whether we go to war or not.
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This became the norm. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, each saw their role as The President moves first and Congress catches up later. And the crises kept coming, the Cold War, Vietnam, later, the war on terror.
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If there is a single tendency that emerges in the presidency over 235 years of its existence, it is that presidents tend to expand their powers. They push out on the envelope of what the Constitution says. And unless somebody is pushing back, then presidential powers expand.
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And with most presidents leaving the office more powerful than they found it, that trajectory has only continued.
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Donald Trump is the most powerful president in American history. The second most powerful president in history
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was Joe Biden and Obama before him, and so on. In other words, the job doesn't reset every four years. It accumulates. Before we wrap up. Come back with me to that White House class trip in 2026. Only this time, bring the whole story with you. Bring the Founders in a sweaty room in Philadelphia. Bring self restrained George Washington. Bring Lincoln, who stretched the presidency in war, and bring fdr, who turned it into the center of a vast administrative state. All of that is in the room with you now. And by the time you arrive in the oval office in 2026, you can feel the full weight of what the office has become. Part of it is sheer scale.
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George Washington's executive branch had about eight employees. And now there are tens and hundreds of thousands of people who work for the executive branch.
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Washington's presidency could fit inside a small room. The modern presidency oversees about 4 million people. The other part is reach and mass communication.
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Theodore Roosevelt mastered newspapers. Franklin Roosevelt mastered radio. Kennedy and Reagan mastered television. Donald Trump is the master of social media. With social media, President Trump has demonstrated you can do this every night. You don't even have any editors. You don't have any filter at all,
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no delay and no reporter asking follow up questions. The President is now always there in your pocket, on your screen, shaping the conversation before you've had your morning coffee. And that constant disability is its own form of power. One the founders never imagined and one that no amount of constitutional design can fully contain. With a massive executive branch beneath him and the ability to speak to the country in real time, you can start to see the appeal of one of the modern presidency's most important the executive order. Executive orders are not new, but in the modern presidency, they have become a much more visible and much more central way to govern. So what are they? They're directives that carry the force of law without requiring a single vote. And you might be thinking, how is that even allowed? Well, it's complicated. The Constitution gives the President broad authority to manage the executive branch and enforce the laws. Executive orders live in that space. Think of them as instructions from the president to the government about how to carry out its work. They can't create new laws from scratch or strike down existing ones. But the line between managing the executive branch and making policy has always been blurry, and the presidents have pushed that line as far as it will go. Courts can strike down executive orders and sometimes do. Congress can pass legislation to override them, and sometimes does. But both of those things take time. Meanwhile, the order stands, which means that for months or even years, a president can reshape federal policy on immigration, climate, trade, all with just a signature. And here's where it becomes self reinforcing. As Congress grew more polarized and gridlocked over the decades, presidents turned to executive orders just to get anything done. But the more presidents governed that way, the less pressure there was on Congress to act, and the less Congress acted, the more normal executive orders became, each side retreating further into its corner while the president's pen filled the vacuum.
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Very much of what happens in the United States today is done as a result of executive orders. And because executive orders can be issued by a president and terminated by the next president, American policy swings back and forth from this to that to this to that.
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So the expansion of executive power isn't just a story of ambitious presidents grabbing for more. It's also a story of a Congress that, whether by dysfunction or by choice, kept ceding ground.
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It becomes really difficult for other countries to figure out what the United States is up to. It makes it difficult for Americans to figure out what their government is up to. So this focusing power on the presidency itself means that America and policy can yo, yo, back and forth, just depending on who's in the office.
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In practice, a business trying to plan imports doesn't know what the tariffs will be next year. An ally trying to count on American support doesn't know if it will still be there after the next election. A policy that took years to build can be undone in an afternoon. As you step out of the Oval Office, back down the hallway, past the portraits and chandeliers, the whole picture now feels both clearer and more complicated. In the late 1700s, the presidency was an experiment, an office designed in fear of concentrated power, but not fully defined. Today, it's something very different. It's the center of a massive administrative state, the command post of the most powerful military on earth, and an office that can, at times, move policy with a single decision. The presidency didn't become this overnight. As we saw, it grew piece by piece, crisis by crisis, accumulating everything that came before. So the real question at the end of the story isn't whether their presidency became more powerful. We know that it did. The question now is, what do Americans want this office to be? For more than two centuries, we've kept asking the president to do more, act faster, respond first, and cut through a slow political system. And when you keep asking one office to do all of that, power doesn't stay still, it gathers. That is the final irony of the modern American presidency. A nation founded in suspicion of concentrated power kept concentrating it anyway, Many thanks to Professor H.W. brands for joining us in today's episode, and thanks to all of you for listening to 1440 Explorers. I'm Sony Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you thought of this episode at podcastsoin140.com 1440explorers is a production of Rime Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Niccolo Minoni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Alice Jones and our sound designer is Jay Cowett. The executive producer at Rime is Dan Bobkoff and the executive producers at 1440 are me, Dan and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.