Dismantling agency capacity
Eliminating or hollowing out an agency's staff, offices, or functions by executive action, outside the legislative process, so that the government can no longer carry out duties Congress established. The abuse is the executive nullifying a congressionally-created function without going through Congress — not the policy merits of a smaller government, and not ordinary mismanagement. Excludes reorganizations and staffing decisions within lawful executive authority, reductions Congress itself authorized or directed, ordinary attrition, and incompetence or administrative failure. The marker is a statutorily grounded function disabled by executive fiat; resulting harm is evidence of significance, not itself the abuse.
Documented entries (4)
Hegseth replaces Congressionally-mandated Military Justice Review Panel with open-ended Pentagon legal-system review under his own general counsel
On May 8, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a two-page memo directing the creation of an "ongoing, long-term, department-wide review of all aspects of the military legal system," convened by Department of Defense General Counsel Earl Matthews and reporting directly to Hegseth. The new panel substitutes for the Military Justice Review Panel — the 13-member independent oversight body created by Congress in April 2022 to report to Congress, which Hegseth disbanded in 2025 after it delivered a 238-page review of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Current and former JAGs describe the move as completing a transfer of military-legal oversight from an independent, Congressionally-created body to an executive-controlled panel staffed by political appointees.
DHS shuts down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, eliminating Congress's detention-oversight body
The Department of Homeland Security wound down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) — the body Congress created in 2019 to investigate detainee deaths, access to medical care, and employee misconduct in immigration detention. DHS attributed the closure to the funding lapse that shut down much of the department, but the appropriations measure that ended the shutdown did not mandate OIDO's closure, and the office sits organizationally outside ICE and CBP. OIDO had already been hollowed out from more than 100 staff at the start of 2025 to roughly five by early 2026; the shutdown eliminates the oversight function entirely as deaths in immigration custody reached a fiscal-year high.
Trump fires all 22 members of the National Science Board overseeing the NSF
On April 24, 2026, the Trump White House emailed all 22 seated members of the National Science Board — the statutory body Congress created in 1950 to set National Science Foundation policy, submit its budget, and approve its programs and awards — informing them their positions were "terminated, effective immediately." The mass dismissal removed the NSF's entire congressionally-created oversight body in a single morning, without legislative action and without replacement appointments in hand, leaving the agency's roughly $9 billion in research funding without its governing board.
Senate Democrats open investigation into Hegseth's dismantling of the military's civilian-harm protection programs
On April 19, 2026, eleven Senate Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth opening a formal investigation into his role in dismantling the military's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) programs. The senators document that, before the U.S. war in Iran, Hegseth cut CHMR funding, fired personnel at the Pentagon's Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, and slashed CHMR staff at the combatant commands "by more than 90 percent" — over the objections of senior military officials — and tie those cuts to a civilian toll the letter puts at more than 1,700 deaths, including strikes on more than 20 schools and a dozen health-care facilities.