Executive Power

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did his best to defend presidential removal power at will notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s lawless decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.

Steven Calabresi | 1.9.2026 10:48 AM

In three previous blog posts, I argued that every President from 1881 to 1933 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 between 1881 and 1933. In this blog post, I will argue that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did his best and his utmost to defend unilateral presidential power to remove officers exercising executive power both prior to and after Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). 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).

Franklin D. Roosevelt served as President from 1933 to 1945. The unitary executive has had no better friend in history than FDR. Roosevelt transformed the office of the presidency by making it much more powerful than ever before. His personal charisma and domination of the new medium of radio, with his fireside chats, helped him to accomplish this. FDR was the first in line of a whole series of imperial presidents.

Early in his Administration, FDR "issued an executive order transferring all of the government's legal authority to the Justice Department…. Roosevelt also transferred the Bureau of the Budget from the Treasury Department to the newly created Executive Office of the President, so that it could become the president's principal means for his asserting control over the entire executive branch." Id. at 280. The Bureau is today called the Office of Management and Budget, and it continues to function to this day as the President's principal tool in controlling the Executive Branch.

FDR made much more aggressive us of the president's power to issue executive orders than had any of his predecessors. He relied on the Vesting Clause of Article II to ban racial discrimination in government procurement. And he relied on his Commander in Chief powers to intern Japanese-Americans wrongly during World War II. "It was also during his tenure that the Federal Register Act regularized the promulgation and publication of executive orders and proclamations. Roosevelt also issued more presidential signing statements than all his........

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