Congress vs. The Presidency: Mano a Mano

We are about to witness something quite different from the typical gridlock of modern Washington. Following the historic midterm results that handed both chambers of Congress to the Democrats, the conventional wisdom suggests the standard script: legislative standstill, mutual recriminations, and a slow crawl toward 2028. But that script assumes an institutional framework that no longer exists. During the first Trump administration, the friction of divided government was heavily muted by an internal, quiet buffer. A long-serving, non-partisan federal bureaucracy operated as an institutional mattress, absorbing executive impact and, in many cases, slow-rolling policies the opposition despised. When Congress wanted to know what was happening inside an agency, a network of sympathetic career civil servants would quietly provide the details. That inside track is gone. The second Trump administration systematically dismantled it—using sweeping personnel overhauls to convert key policy…

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