Executive Power

Every president from 1901 to 1921 successfully defended presidential removal power at will.

Steven Calabresi | 1.7.2026 11:37 AM

In a previous blog post, I argued that every President from 1881 to 1901 had successfully defended the President's power to remove at will all officers exercising executive power and that no independent agencies in the modern sense of the term had been created during the last twenty years of the 19th Century. In this blog post, I will argue that every President from 1901 to 1921 also successfully defended presidential removal power at will over all executive officers and that no independent agencies in the modern sense of the term were created between 1901 and 1921 during the Progressive Era. My argument grows out of my co-authored book with Professor Christopher Yoo, who deserves all the credit and none of the blame for anything in this blog post. Steven G. Calabresi & Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (Yale University Press 2008).

Theodore Roosevelt served as president from 1901 to 1909, and he had a breathtakingly large view of presidential power, which he called "The Stewardship Theory." Id. at 239-240. Teddy Roosevelt thought the President could do anything at all that was not specifically prohibited by the Constitution or statutory law. He called this the Jackson-Lincoln view of presidential power. Teddy Roosevelt believed that Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton had correctly described the scope of presidential power. He personalized the office of the presidency in a charismatic way that had never been done before, and he appealed to the people over the heads of both Houses of Congress. Teddy Roosevelt was immensely popular.

Teddy Roosevelt contrasted his Stewardship Theory of the presidency with what he called William Howard Taft's James Buchanan Theory of the presidency. Taft thought the president could only act pursuant to statutory and/or constitutional authorization. As a matter of constitutional law, Taft was clearly right, and Teddy Roosevelt had a dangerous and unconstitutionally broad conception of presidential power. He withdrew hundreds of millions of acres of western land from public entry without having any statutory authority to do so. Teddy Roosevelt wielded the removal power with zeal, as Christopher Yoo and I show in our book, maintaining strict control over all his cabinet members.

In his eighth annual message to Congress Teddy Roosevelt proposed:

that all existing independent bureaus and commissions … be placed under the jurisdiction of appropriate executive departments … [arguing that it was] … unwise from every standpoint, and results only in mischief, to have any executive work done save by the purely executive bodies, under the control of the president; and each such executive body should be under the immediate supervision of a Cabinet member.

Calabresi & Yoo at 241. No independent entities were created during Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, and Teddy Roosevelt, himself, personally supervised several special prosecutors who investigated various mini scandals in his administration.

Teddy Roosevelt made extensive use of executive orders as president, for the first time in American history issuing 1,091 such orders "nearly as many as had been issued by all previous presidents over the prior 111 years (1,259)." Id. at 242. He appointed the Charles Keep Commission, which........

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