Outside the Beltway

Less Than Meets the Eye?

Trump's style may obscure a lack of substance.

James Joyner · Thursday, January 22, 2026 · 1 comment

The latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show, “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?” is well worth the listen or read. It’s an interview with Yuval Levin, the , director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, whom Klein describes as “one of the smartest thinkers on the right — a real conservative who thinks deeply about institutions and the nature of the presidency and how these things work in the constitutional order.”

Levin’s thesis is that, while Trump’s first year in office has been remarkably eventful, the President’s failure to follow normal policymaking processes and, especially, work with Congress to pass policies into law means he has actually created less durable change than most of his modern predecessors.

We spent the first six months of the year watching DOGE take all kinds of actions intended to reduce federal spending and restructure the government.

But at the end of the day, because there was no legislative action to change spending, there was no real change in spending. The government was on a continuing resolution on two of them for the entire year — so we’re still at Biden’s spending levels.

Overall, because the “big, beautiful bill” spent a little more on immigration enforcement and on defense, and because appropriations were even for the year, the federal government actually spent 4 percent more in 2025 than in 2024.

He provides one example as illustrative:

The story of N.I.H. spending is very interesting because in most areas of government, if you track it month by month — and this is the way to track federal spending — there are a lot of ways to chop up the numbers.

But there’s a monthly Treasury statement that just reports how much money went out the door. And I think that’s the number to look at. It’s public, it’s on the internet. It’s very easy to read. In most departments, those numbers looked identical in 2025 to 2024. Appropriations were the same, and so spending out the door was the same.

There was a long government shutdown, but at the end of it, all the money went out. So in the end, it looks the same.

N.I.H. looks very different. In the first six months of the year, N.I.H. spending was far behind its 2024 levels. There seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue, even to force a confrontation over impoundment — the president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on N.I.H. money.

Then in June or early July, you see a sudden acceleration of N.I.H. spending. Clearly, there was some decision made that the money had to go out the door by the end of the year.

They did that in a way that deformed or distorted some of that spending. They decided to spend multiyear money all in one year, on a broad range of federal grants, in order to be able to get the money out the door so that 100 percent of the appropriated amount would be spent by the end of the fiscal year.

That’s going to create problems down the road because with these multiyear grants, the institutions that receive them are not really equipped to spend them all in one year.

But in any case, a decision was made — I think it’s unavoidable, from looking at the numbers — to avoid an impoundment fight and to spend all the money. And by the end of the year, N.I.H. had spent 100 percent of its appropriated money for the year.

Essentially, Trump is dominating the attention space but not much else:

One way I think about it is that the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. So if something going on in the world is troubling or challenging, at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem.

One way to think about that is he wants to do everything. He wants to control everything. But it’s actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do, and it’s not using most of the powers as the chief executive of the American government. But it’s absolutely true.

It’s not just legislation. Regulation, too, works this way. There’s never a moment when you can say: We’ve done this. When you’re moving regulatory action, there’s a proposed rule, and there are comments, and it’s years, and at the end of the day, you’ve done something that’s going to endure — but it’s not an easy story to tell, and it’s very dull and lawyerly.

If you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia, then you can just say it that day, and there’s the C.E.O., and he says it, too, and something big is going on.

So I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

But he also acknowledges that some things Trump has done by fiat will have long-lasting effects.

They’ve used the weight of the government as a cudgel to push people around. That’s no small thing, and I think it does create cultural changes.

I do think that if you take a longer-term view — and I don’t mean a generational view, but a medium-term, five-, 10-year view — this way of doing things does achieve less than it seems to in the news cycle.

But absolutely, they’re changing the attitude of people who work for the government. They’re changing the attitude of people who rely on the government for funding or just for a stable relationship that makes business possible.

I would say that the effect that is having is to undermine people’s sense of the American federal government as a predictable, reliable player in various arenas at home and abroad.

So it’s not the specifics of what the administration is driving people to do. I don’t think it’s actually going to be possible to go back to the pre-Trump attitude toward the federal government.

[…]

I think that’s true about a lot of other countries’ thinking about the United States, too, after the past year. The assumption that the United States would just play a stabilizing role in various environments is no longer tenable.

I think a lot of people who have depended on the government without thinking about it too much have to think about it more now. I’d say there’s some good in this — some of that dependence was really, as the president likes to say, abusing the government or using it. Universities should depend on the federal government less than they do.

But the downside of this, the cost of it, is much higher than the upside because the sheer stability made possible by a predictable, reliable federal government was a massive invisible subsidy of American life. It made it possible for Americans to make assumptions about what various institutions could do for them that we’ve never really had to think about.

There’s an engine of basic research humming in the background of our lives. There are ways in which other countries treat Americans because of what they expect our government to be for them that we just take for granted.

If we can’t take that for granted, the costs will feel and be very real. So I’m not suggesting that nothing has changed, but I think that we have to see that the way in which this president has thought about his role and his power is very different, very distinct from how most presidents do.

I think it’s short-termism. Ultimately, it doesn’t advance the ball in the way that some of the president’s supporters think. But it is changing things — and some of that change is very much for the worse.

I largely think Levin is right here, but I see this much less philosophically than he does. I agree that the manner in which Trump and his administration have operated mean that they have made relatively few permanent changes in our laws and regulations. Things done via executive order or mere bullying can be quickly undone by the next administration. But, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly noted, Trump has ruptured the trust of longstanding American allies built over generations in a way that may never be restored.

Similarly, I think it’s wrong to look at DOGE in terms of budget cuts. It’s true that very little was actually cut, as Congress and the courts reversed many of the moves. But USAID is likely gone forever. Even if a successor administration restarted it, the damage to American soft power—to say nothing of lives lost—is likely permanent. More broadly, tens of thousands of federal employees had their social contract of career employment broken on a whim.

This perspective is interesting:

The story of Congress this year is not a happy story if you care about Congress. The institution has been pushed aside in a lot of ways. It has been ignored. It has not had a lot to do.

At the same time, the Congress at this point is in the process, through its regular appropriations, of essentially undoing the work that DOGE did that members disapproved of — undoing the changes made to scientific research funding, undoing some of the changes made on the personnel side.

The Senate has had a very active year of resisting presidential nominations that senators didn’t approve of. This hasn’t really been part of the narrative we tell ourselves, but the U.S. Senate, on its website, publishes an up-to-date list of presidential nominations withdrawn in this session of Congress. And that number at this point is 54. Fifty-four is a very high number.

So just about once a week now, for a year, on average, the president has withdrawn a nomination that he had sent to the Senate.

The Senate has resisted presidential appointments below the cabinet level — to a much greater degree than we imagine — and is pushing back some with appropriations.

It’s not enough. The Congress is underactive, as you know. If you get me started on that question, I have a lot to say about it — I’m a congressional supremacist. But there has been some restraining action.

The courts have done a lot to restrain the administration. The administration has faced a lot of federal cases against it — 573 cases were filed. About 230 of them are still in process. Of the ones that have been decided, the administration has lost 57 percent. That’s a very, very poor record for the federal government in federal court.

A very small number of those losses were then appealed to the Supreme Court. The administration has had an interesting strategy of appealing only cases that the solicitor general really expects to win. They’ve appealed only about 25 cases, having lost something like 200 cases. And so the courts have restrained the administration quite a bit.

What we haven’t seen is the kind of confrontations that I certainly was worried about last year, a year ago. We haven’t seen a big fight over impoundment — I thought that would happen, and it hasn’t. And we haven’t seen the administration openly defying the Supreme Court.

Now, that could happen. The tariff case is an example of an issue that the president really cares about. But it hasn’t. And that’s worth seeing, too.

On the one hand, this is small comfort. While Congress has mostly been missing in action, it has done some things to restrain presidential power. The administration has only openly defied lower court judges but hasn’t yet done so with the Supreme Court. Which, incidentally, hasn’t yet made final rulings on key cases that could upend how our Constitutional system has functioned in the modern era.

To be sure—and this is more obvious in the audio than the text—Levin in not one bit happy about any of this. He simply argues that Trump’s rhetoric and gambits have dominated the news cycle more than they have translated into policy. And, indeed, things like Senate rejection of subcabinet nominees have gone unnoticed—certainly by me.