With just two days to go before voters decide control of Congress, the White House is looking past Tuesday’s election to a very different question: what happens if President Donald Trump loses one or both chambers and still wants to move his agenda forward? According to reporting published on Sunday, November 1, senior aides have spent months quietly building an answer, centred on presidential power rather than new legislation.
The reporting, based on a White House official and two other people familiar with the planning who spoke on condition of anonymity, describes work that began in April. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought have been working with the White House Counsel’s Office to map out executive actions the president could take on his own in areas including immigration, tariffs, housing costs and federal spending. White House Counsel Will Scharf and his team have been examining, in the words of one official cited in the reporting, what the president can legally do alone, where he might test the edges of that authority, and how such decisions could be defended in court.
President Trump himself has been briefed on the preparations and has taken part in discussions about them, the same reporting said. When one person familiar with the planning was asked how comfortable the president would be governing mainly through executive authority under a Democratic Congress, the answer reported was: “very comfortable.” That single assessment captures the central tension of the final days of the campaign. In public, the president has spent the past month travelling from state to state urging voters to preserve Republican majorities. In private, according to the reporting, his aides have been preparing for a political landscape in 2027 in which those majorities are gone.
The White House, for its part, pushed back against the idea that Republican losses are likely and rejected the framing of the reporting. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the administration and what she called commonsense Republicans would continue to secure the borders, restore law and order, put more money back into the pockets of hard-working Americans, and deliver wins for the American people. The statement did not confirm or deny the specific planning described in the reporting, but it made clear that the administration does not accept the premise that the election is already lost.
WHY THE MIDTERM MATH MAKES EXECUTIVE POWER SO IMPORTANT
To understand why this planning matters, it helps to start with the numbers. Republicans currently hold narrow majorities in both chambers: 218 to 214 in the House of Representatives and 53 to 47 in the Senate. Democrats therefore need a net gain of four seats in each chamber to take control. Polling reported alongside the White House planning story favours Democrats to win the House, while the Senate is described as too close to call.
That arithmetic explains the paradox at the heart of the story. If Democrats capture Congress, they would gain real power to investigate the administration, block legislation the president supports, and constrain his spending priorities. At the same time, the president would keep broad executive authority over trade, foreign policy and the federal bureaucracy — authority he has already used aggressively since returning to office in January 2025. A change of control in Congress would therefore not, on its own, stop the administration. It would change the tools available to it, shifting the balance from lawmaking toward unilateral action.
That shift would not be new for this presidency. Since January 2025, Trump has used executive authority to impose sweeping tariffs, intensify immigration enforcement, shrink parts of the federal workforce, and pursue foreign-policy goals without seeking new laws from Congress. The one major exception noted in the reporting was the large package of tax and spending cuts passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law in July 2025. Everything else in the administration’s record so far has leaned heavily on the presidency itself, and the planning described this weekend suggests that pattern would deepen, not reverse, if Democrats win.
The campaign trail has reflected that same urgency. Trump has spent the final month holding rallies across the country, including a final midterm push that has taken him through battleground and traditionally Republican states alike. The closing days of the campaign have seen sharp exchanges between Trump and former President Barack Obama, while Trump’s trip to Daytona Beach underlined how tight races in Florida have become. The planning story, published as that blitz entered its final weekend, shows the other side of the same campaign: a White House that is campaigning hard for a Republican Congress while also drawing up plans for life without one.
GOVERNING WITHOUT CONGRESS: WHAT EXECUTIVE POWER CAN — AND CANNOT — DO
Among the executive actions said to be under consideration are new tariffs on imports of critical minerals and wind turbines, tighter rules on visas for international students and temporary foreign workers, and measures aimed at lowering housing and construction costs. Federal agencies have, according to one person familiar with the work, submitted proposals and legal reviews of actions the administration could take unilaterally. That detail matters because it suggests the planning is not merely a set of ideas discussed in the West Wing. It has, if the reporting is accurate, reached the stage where departments have been asked to put forward concrete options and to assess whether those options would survive legal challenge.
Vought’s role is particularly significant. As director of the Office of Management and Budget, he oversees federal spending, and the reporting says he is examining which priorities can move forward using money Congress has already appropriated. He is also said to want to change federal grant rules so that political appointees have more say over which government programmes receive taxpayer money. If adopted, that change could give the White House greater influence over federal spending without seeking new congressional approval, even in areas where Congress has already set overall funding levels. Critics would be likely to argue that such a move blurs the line between executing the law and rewriting it. Supporters would be likely to argue that it restores presidential control over an executive branch that, in their view, has too often acted on its own.
The president has repeatedly invoked national emergencies to expand his ability to act without new legislation, and that tool would remain available to him under a Democratic Congress. Congress can vote to end such emergencies, but the president can veto that vote, and overriding a veto requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers — a threshold neither party is expected to reach. That veto power is one reason analysts quoted in the reporting argue that a Democratic Congress would constrain, but not paralyse, the presidency. Democrats could refuse to pass Trump-backed legislation, and the president could veto Democratic legislation he opposes. The result, in that scenario, is less lawmaking and more governing by executive order, proclamation and agency rule.
There are, however, real limits to that approach, and the reporting is clear about them. Control of the Senate would allow Democrats to block the president’s judicial and executive-branch nominees, including any future Supreme Court pick. Andrew Busch, a public policy professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was quoted as expecting Democrats to be very reluctant to approve the president’s appointments if they win the Senate. That would affect not only judges but also the senior officials needed to run departments and agencies. A president can issue orders, but he still needs confirmed leaders to carry many of them out, and a hostile Senate can slow that process to a crawl.
The courts are another limit. Executive actions that go beyond the president’s legal authority can be blocked, and the White House knows it. That is why, according to the reporting, the administration plans to seek legal opinions from the Justice Department on what the president can do without Congress and how to defend those actions if they are challenged. Nathan Gonzales, editor at Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political analysis outlet, was quoted as saying that Trump in the past two years has largely ignored Congress and tried to do as much as possible through executive orders and executive power, and that he would only continue on that path if Democrats win majorities. That assessment, if correct, points to a 2027 defined less by bipartisan deals and more by a running legal contest between the White House and Congress over where presidential power ends.
THE ONE CHALLENGE EXECUTIVE ACTION CANNOT SIDESTEP: INVESTIGATIONS
There is one challenge that executive action cannot sidestep, and the reporting gives it a section of its own: congressional investigations. Senior House Democrats and committee aides have previously discussed using hearings, subpoenas and document requests to examine whether the president has used presidential power to benefit himself, allies or donors. Those discussions, reported earlier, would take on concrete force if Democrats win the House, because committee chairmanships, subpoena power and hearing schedules would change hands.
Trump aides have, according to all three people familiar with the planning, been preparing for that prospect for months. White House lawyers have been briefing political appointees and agency leaders on how to handle congressional inquiries, document requests and subpoenas, and have advised officials to be careful about what they put in writing. They have also sought a Justice Department opinion that could allow the president to invoke executive privilege to shield communications with private advisers from congressional scrutiny. That preparation suggests the White House expects oversight to become the defining feature of the next Congress if Democrats win, even as it plans to keep advancing policy through executive means.
The two tracks — policy by executive action on one side, and preparation for investigations on the other — are not contradictory. They are, in fact, two halves of the same strategy. The first is about keeping the administration’s agenda moving when legislation is no longer available. The second is about limiting the damage from the oversight that a new Democratic majority would bring. Together, they describe a White House that is not waiting for Tuesday’s results to begin thinking about 2027. It has, according to this reporting, been thinking about it since April.
That timeline is worth noting. April is early in an election year to be planning for defeat, and the fact that the work is said to have started then may tell voters something about how the White House itself reads the political map. It may also simply reflect prudent planning: any administration facing a midterm election in which it could lose Congress would be expected to consider its options. The distinction between prudent contingency planning and an expectation of defeat is one that both parties will argue over in the coming days, and it is likely to feature in the closing arguments of the campaign itself.
What is not in doubt is the stakes. Tuesday’s election will decide whether the president spends the final two years of his term working with a friendly Congress, negotiating with a divided one, or governing around an opposition one. The reporting published on November 1 suggests that, in the third scenario, the White House already has a draft answer: use every executive tool available, defend those tools in court, protect internal communications from investigation where the law allows, and keep moving on immigration, trade, housing and spending without waiting for Congress to act. Voters will decide on Tuesday whether that plan ever needs to be used. The White House, it appears, has already decided to be ready if it does.
SOURCES
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, The Straits Times and Devdiscourse.