Executive Functions Chat

Bob Bauer discusses the Supreme Court’s order declining to stay the injunction against the Postal Service’s ballot-mail rule, issued the previous evening over a brief concurrence from Justice Kavanaugh and a longer dissent from Justices Alito and Thomas. He reads the Court’s order as a possible signal that eleventh-hour executive interventions in the electoral process would meet skepticism; notes the measure of bipartisanship in the record, including red-state election officials who told the Court the rule could not be implemented in time; and cautions that the rule’s application to the 2028 (and later) elections remains an open question. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith cover three sites of Republican pushback against the administration's election interventions: the Missouri dispute over which congressional map governs November, Justice Department election monitors in Wyoming, and a Supreme Court brief from 38 current and former election officials, several from deep-red states, arguing the mail-ballot rule cannot be implemented in time for the midterms. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack interviews Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the Ashton B. Carter Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and formerly Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Deputy National Security Advisor, about her new Kennedy School report, Deterrence by Resilience: Securing the United States and Promoting Innovation in the Age of Bioconvergence . They discuss how artificial intelligence has changed the biological threat landscape since ChatGPT, the scenarios that worry her most, and the report's recommendations across prevention, detection, attribution, readiness, response, and resilience—among them a nationwide early warning system, rapid attribution, a federally chartered National Institute for Bioresilience, and an Operation Warp Speed-style partnership with industry built before the crisis rather than during it. They also take up the legislation this would require, what the frontier AI labs might make of it, and the surveillance and privacy tradeoffs the program implies. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack and Bob discuss litigation over the Trump administration’s executive order on the Postal Service and election integrity, and the recent final rule that the Postal Service issued to implement the order. They explain what the Trump administration is seeking to accomplish with these maneuvers and examine the fate of two cases challenging the final rule that are pending in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts. They also analyze the practical difficulties in implementing the rule before the fall election, the role of federal criminal enforcement as a source of pressure on the states, and how the Purcell principle bears on litigation brought this close to an election. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Bob speaks with Danielle Friedman, Legal Director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, about the Initiatives’ recently published analysis of state criminal laws that could apply to potential federal government interference in the 2026 and future elections. They discuss laws, varying from state to state, that address deployment of military or other armed forces at the polls; actions to delay or disrupt the delivery of election mail, such as registration forms and ballots; and the seizure and removal of voting materials from election offices. Their discussion covers the likely federal government defenses against state criminal prosecutions of this kind. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack Goldsmith interviews former Homeland Security Secretary and Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson about the article he co-authored in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy , "Presidential War Powers, Executive Expansion, and Congressional Retreat." They discuss how Congress's power over war has eroded, the constitutional and practical obstacles to reasserting it, and the war in Iran as a live example. Mentioned: * Jeh Johnson and Ethan Klaris, Presidential War Powers: Executive Expansion and Congressional Retreat (2026) * Cyrus Vance, Striking the Balance: Congress and the President Under the War Powers Resolution (1984) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

As the 2026 midterms approach, Jack and Bob give a big-picture overview of the Trump administration’s efforts to use federal law enforcement and executive power to influence the congressional elections. They discuss the constitutional limits on presidential authority over election rules, the administration’s novel tactics and mounting losses in court thus far, and the potential deployment of the military or ICE to the polls. They also examine the effects of the administration’s agenda on voter turnout, public confidence in the electoral process, and the risk of contested results. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack speaks with University of Virginia School of Law Professor Saikrishna Prakash about the implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook . They discussed the breadth of the holding in Slaughter ; its implications for the president’s control over inferior officers, civil servants, and non-Article III courts; and its broader import for the non-delegation doctrine, the major questions doctrine, and other mechanisms that could constrain the now-more-broadly-empowered unitary executive. They also discussed the validity of the carve-out in both cases for the Federal Reserve. Relevant reading: - “ The Executive Power of Removal ” by Aditya Bamzai and Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash (Harvard Law Review, 2023) - “ New Light on the Decision of 1789 ” by Saikrishna Prakash (Cornell Law Review, 2006) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack chats with Robert Wright about his forthcoming book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning . They discuss why Wright views AI through an evolutionary lens, the promises and perils of increasingly capable AI systems, and the prospects for international cooperation—particularly between the U.S. and China—in managing AI-related risks. They also examine Wright’s argument that successfully governing AI may require a modest moral upgrade across society, including individual efforts to preserve cognitive sovereignty and mitigate the biases and tribal instincts that can hinder global cooperation. Mentioned: - Robert Wright, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026) - “ When AI Builds Itself ” (Anthropic, June 4, 2026) - “ US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks ,” by Cristina Criddle and Demetri Sevastopulo ( Financial Times , June 4, 2026) - “ Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security ,” (The White House, June 2, 2026) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Bob and Jack discuss President Trump’s nomination of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the current acting attorney general, to become Attorney General. They review Blanche’s record at DOJ, including his role in political weaponization, ethics concerns, and the fallout from the proposed Anti-Weaponization Fund. They also examine why Trump is forcing a confirmation fight when Blanche could plausibly lead the Justice Department for the rest of Trump’s term without Senate confirmation. What’s at stake, they discuss, is whether the Senate will endorse, and thus take responsibility for, Trump’s DOJ weaponization campaign. Mentioned: * “ The High Stakes of the Blanche Nomination ” by Bob Bauer (Executive Functions, June 9, 2026) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Following President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, Bob Bauer asks Avril Haines, who held the position during the Biden administration, to explain the history behind the establishment of the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the role of the director as leader of the intelligence community. They also discuss why the law requires nominees for the director to have “extensive national security experience” when there is no such requirement for the director of the CIA; the significance of ODNI appointments for U.S. cooperation with allies on intelligence intelligence gathering and collaboration; and the importance of the position in congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Bob and Jack discuss the Justice Department and IRS “settlement” with President Trump and his family, which created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for Trump allies and immunized Trump and others from IRS scrutiny and penalties for past conduct. They discuss how the episode combines two hallmarks of the Trump presidency: abuse of government power and self-enrichment. They also consider possible judicial remedies and the causes and possible consequences of the sharp congressional reaction, including from many Republicans. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack chats with Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about his new book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence . They discuss current challenges in AI safety, the U.S.-China race and prospects for cooperation, and the emerging risks posed by powerful new models like Anthropic’s Mythos. They also talk about tensions between frontier labs and the U.S. government, and the trajectory toward greater government control. Mentioned: * Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (2026) Thumbnail: President Trump delivers remarks at the White House AI Summit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian) Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Executive Functions. This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack , Apple , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts. Jack Goldsmith: Today I’m chatting with Sebastian Mallaby, who’s a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an acclaimed biographer and writer. And we’re going to be talking about his newest book, which is called The Infinity Machine . Sebastian, thanks for talking with me. Sebastian Mallaby: Thank you, Jack. Nice to be with you. So tell us what the book is about. Who is Demis Hassabis, and why did you write a book about him? So the book is about artificial intelligence, and it’s centered on this character, Demis Hassabis, who is, in a way, the OG sort of AI lab leader, right? He starts DeepMind, this startup in London, back in 2010, before AI could even recognize the photograph of a cat—like nothing worked. It was full AI winter. So this is five years before Sam Altman and Elon Musk start OpenAI. It’s fully 11 years before Anthropic gets started. So he was extremely early. So if you wanted to tell the story of the making of modern AI through a personality, you know, Demis’s career and intellectual development maps perfectly onto that story. So the thing that’s most interesting to me about him is that, as you emphasize in the book, his real interest in this, I think it’s fair to say, is scientific and not profit-making. And he, at least at the outset, and I think even today, has a rather idealistic—to me anyway, idealistic or optimistic—conception of the technology and how it can be used. But the story I also see is someone who—and I don’t mean this uncharitably—but who has basically engaged in a series of compromises or fudges with regard to those values as he’s gotten deeper and deeper into the AI competition. So is that fair? And can you talk about that arc? Yes. I mean, he started DeepMind in 2010 with an absolute focus on AI safety. In fact, he met his scientific co-founder, Shane Legg, at a safety lecture in which Shane projected that by 2030 or so, AIs would be sophisticated enough—cleverer than humans—have their own sort of objective functions, and would maybe start to threaten humans. And this was the lecture over which they bonded. And then in 2014, Demis Hassabis sells his company DeepMind to Google. And part of the sale condition was that AI would not be used for military purposes, that it would be safeguarded by a sort of ethics oversight committee that would be separate from the corporate leadership of Google. So he took it very seriously. And then this continues for a while. Between 2016 and 2019, he wages a secret battle, a thing called Project Mario, where he’s trying to put pressure on Google’s leadership to have this independent safety oversight board, because Google kind of reneged on the deal at the point of sale in 2014. And then after 2019, it kind of fades away. And, you know, by now you have Google being willing to provide AI to the national security establishment. In the US, there is no safety and ethics oversight board. And Demis is left explaining to me, well, you know, I feel as if, you know, if I lean into Google and I’m part of the team there, and I, you know, understand the different pressures that a corporation is under, then I have a seat at the table. And so when push comes to shove, I can chime in in favor of safety. And so I’m a good person—trust me—is kind of the bottom line, which is a sort of flimsy scaffolding of reassurance for an alarmed world. Especially since—I mean, this was also a time—a lot of this is happening at a time before ChatGPT amazes the world a few years ago with whatever model it was, I can’t remember. And suddenly there’s this massive competition among several frontier models that has been extremely fierce. And now we’re in a massive competition among those labs and with Chinese firms, and the countries are in fierce competition. And he’s now leading—you talk in the book about how they combined, how Google combined its AI efforts—and he’s leading it. So he’s really leading, in some sense, this fiercely competitive charge, which isn’t taking—doesn’t appear to be taking—safety all that seriously. Is that fair? Yeah, it’s fair. And, you know, I think there’s a slight caveat in that his style is to pursue safety ideas secretly. I mean, he doesn’t talk about them. And Dario Amodei, the leader of Anthropic, is extremely public when he picks a fight with the Pentagon, when he releases this new model called Mythos, where he’s publicly said, you know, this is too dangerous to release generally, so I’m going to release it to a sort of restricted list of people. He likes to be very out there in public with it. Demis Hassabis, on the other hand, did two important things, to my knowledge, about safety. One was this secret battle I described before, which he was so unkeen to have sort of move into the public sphere that when I discovered it through leaks from other people, you know, I had to talk to his general counsel, who was trying to tell me I wasn’t allowed to publish that. So he really didn’t want that to be public. And then secondly, he told Rishi Sunak in 2023, after ChatGPT came out, “Mr. Prime Minister, you know, I have an idea for you, which is you could have an international discussion on AI safety—invite the Chinese, invite everybody—start a process that might lead to some kind of understanding internationally on AI safety.” Demis never told me that he told the Prime Minister that. I only know this because other people, like the Prime Minister’s advisers, told me. So he didn’t advertise what he was doing. So I think he’s trying to do things now, but they’re not in the public view. So that’s a slight caveat. But basically, you’re right. I mean, he’s leading one of the major labs, Google DeepMind, in frontier AI, racing as fast as he can, even releasing, by the way, open-weight models, which by his own analysis are dangerous because you can’t control them once they’re out there. And so there is this contradiction—you could call it even hypocrisy—between his stated beliefs about AI safety and what he’s actually doing. And so then the question is, well, how harshly does one judge him? And I’ve just floated the word hypocrisy. But on the other hand, were he to quit his job and go off and become a professor somewhere and pursue research, which I think is the alternative path for him, it wouldn’t make the world safer, right? There’d still be this race dynamic. To be clear, I wasn’t judging him. And he seems—I’m trying to understand—he seems like a thoroughly decent, honorable, brilliant guy. I’m just trying to understand the mindset of someone who, from a very young age, had these extraordinary scientific ambitions, which he’s been as important as anyone in making possible. And—but safety and this kind of benign vision has always been part of it, and it just seems to have been overtaken by reality—mostly competitive, financial, and global competition reality. And I’m just wondering how he processes that. That’s what I’m getting at. Absolutely. I mean, I was exactly trying to do the same thing—to kind of figure out how you process it and sort of portray that. And, you know, at the end of the book, he tells me, you know, I’m in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, Shane Legg and I projected back in 2009, 2010 that by around 2030, AI would be very powerful. And that’s kind of what’s going to happen. And we’ve been central to building it. So, you know, I’ve delivered on this vision in an amazingly gratifying way. On the other hand, I had this hope that I could control the technology somehow and make it safe, and that hasn’t worked. And, you know, when you want to ask, you know, why did it turn out so contrary to his expectations? You know, it’s the Oppenheimer syndrome. Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project, built the amazing technology, and was an incredible scientific leader as well as a scientist, and thought he could sort of go and sell Truman not to use the bomb or to give the technology to the UN or whatever. Truman just kicks him out of his office and says, “Don’t bring that guy in here again.” So scientists think that they can control their inventions, but often the inventions have their own will. Okay, you’ve written a lot of interesting essays closer to the topics of this Substack in connection with the publication of the book. And I just want to talk about some of these policy and governance themes that are implicated—that are talked about in the book—but that you’ve talked about, I think, more in connection with the publication of the book. First of all—and you’re, you know, the keenest of observers of these various relationships and where we are in these AI races—so I just want to get your temperature on, first, what is the state of the relations between the U.S. government and the frontier labs? I mean, we know about the DOD confrontation with Anthropic and then with Mythos, the government trying to apparently get its hands on that technology, or at least try to reach some kind of accommodation with Anthropic. How do you see—I want to go through different pieces of the relationships and the competitions at stake here—how do you see the relationship right now between the US government and the frontier labs? Well, I think it’s just worth saying at the beginning that, you know, the background—if one goes back to 2023, 2024, the two years after ChatGPT came out, it made all this feel urgent—the background was that there was a lot of collaboration. And if you talk to people, I think, you know, Ben Buchanan, who was at the National Security Council doing AI policy, is on the record about this. He says, you know, whenever I talked to the labs, there was no resistance to the idea of regulation. It was more the opposite—that they were telling me, “Hey, this is serious. This is powerful. This is scary. This is coming. You need to do something.” And so when he wanted to, you know, set up the AI Safety Institute, which happened in the Biden years or so on, there wasn’t much pushback, contrary to sort of what one might suspect. There wasn’t much pushback from the objects of the regulatory impetus. Now, the regulation at that point was extremely, you know, emergent. It wasn’t really biting very much. But still, it’s worth noting that the baseline here is collaboration. Then you move into 2025. President Trump is in office. He essentially doesn’t want to talk about regulation. He’s more keen on competition, acceleration—just make sure the U.S. has the most powerful AI. And so that kind of goes off the agenda. Now, in 2026, it comes back, both because of this fight over Anthropic’s models and how they are used by the national security establishment, and because of Mythos, the cybersecurity model. And I’d say that right now you have this sort of, you know, weird and sort of unstable contradiction of impetuses, where on the one hand, you know, the administration has deemed Anthropic to be a supply chain risk, which is an extraordinary name to attach to a U.S. company. I think it’s the first time that’s ever happened. And so it’s extremely antagonistic. And you had this Slack message that Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, wrote, and which got leaked. It was a Slack message to his own staff. And what he said was something like, you know, “The Trump administration wants dictator-level obeisance from me, and I’m not going to give it.” So that shows you the temperature of the relationship there. But on the other hand, they are talking together about Mythos, and, you know, Amodei went to the White House to speak to people about it a couple of weeks ago. So I think it’s a mixture of suspicion and sort of a distant relationship, but then at the same time, a need created by Mythos that—wow, you know, we have no choice but to talk to each other, and we’re going to have to do that. So two questions following up. One is, I could never really tell how serious—I think some more serious than others, maybe Anthropic—how serious the labs were when they said, “Please regulate us.” Sam Altman testified to that: “Please regulate me.” I don’t believe he really thought that. It’s clearly—but it’s a good thing to say when you’re developing this massively dangerous, consequential technology in the private sector. In case something goes wrong or, you know, it’s always nice to have said we asked to be regulated and you didn’t do it. I’m just wondering how serious that request is, especially given in the last presidential election, a lot of the big money behind—or at least in connection with—the AI labs, the kind of Silicon Valley big money, went all in for Trump. And, you know, David Sacks gets installed in the White House and implements this kind of libertarian policy, hands-off policy. So first question: how serious is that request to be regulated? Well, I think when we talk about Silicon Valley in broad-brush terms, we need to actually break that down a bit. And you’ve got someone like Marc Andreessen, whose commercial interests as a venture capitalist are that he wants to back, you know, upstart challenger AI labs. He’s not going to back, you know, the big hyperscalers because they don’t need his money, right? So he wants to back essentially startups that are probably going to use open-weight models. And so open-weight, by definition—you cannot be in favor of regulation and be in favor of open weight. You know, open weight is the least regulated type of AI distribution mechanism. And so, yes, when you’re talking about Marc Andreessen, he’s extremely pro-Trump and extremely deregulatory and laissez-faire. And so there’s no seriousness whatsoever in any comment to the fact that you need more safety if it’s coming out of his mouth. I think, to be fair, it’s not coming out of his mouth. True, correct. So then you move to other people who are saying that they want to be regulated. And I think in some cases, someone like Sam Altman probably is straightforwardly, you know, insincere. But I’d say that, you know, all of these characters who are running the frontier labs have said things at different times, and they’ve both wanted safety. And when Sam Altman created OpenAI in 2015, the rationale for creating it was safety and for the AI to be used for the public good. And who knows? I think he might even have meant it in 2015. But as time has gone on and the race dynamic has become so white-hot, any instinct he might have had to be sincere about wanting to be slowed down has been overwhelmed by his desire to win the race. But I think there’s both sides of that. Inside one human being, there could be two personalities. And I think, you know, there’s just a different balance in these different people. So, you know, probably Sam Altman is the most prone to going for acceleration rather than regulation kind of when a stress point comes. I’d say Dario Amodei is the most prone to be safe when a stress point comes. Demis is somewhere in between. Elon—I don’t think he’s really been tested. So last question in this vein—it just, how likely is it—let me put it this way—it seems inevitable, given the rapid changes in these technologies and the growing perceived dangers in the technology—Mythos being one example, but there are lots of examples. And given the stakes of these technologies in private hands in the United States, so given the dangers they’re spewing and the stakes vis-à-vis the competition with China and national security more generally, it seems inevitable to me that—set aside legality for a second—it seems inevitable to me that the United States gets its hands on this. And I don’t know what the mechanism looks like or what the institution looks like, but that the U.S. government cannot afford not to, in some sense, own this technology, both for its own purposes and for safety purposes. True or false? Broadly true. I mean, by “own,” you would include, I think, control. I mean, it could be a regulatory model. Yeah, let me be clear: I don’t mean technically own. I mean control. That’s a better word. So then I think true, yes. I think, in fact, we’ve just run that experiment in the last few weeks, because you had a deregulatory, pro-accelerationist administration in power. And all of a sudden, an actual case of an AI that threatens stability emerges in the form of Mythos. And it looks as if it could unravel all kinds of building blocks of the internet and cyberspace. Banks would have their bank accounts emptied, et cetera, et cetera. And they turn on a dime. And all of a sudden, the Treasury Secretary is saying to the Fed chairman, “We need to call the heads of the banks and tell them to take this seriously. And, you know, we need to get our hands on this.” He’s—you know, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, reportedly has floated the idea of, you know, sort of—I forget what the term is—but you’ll know—essentially requisitioning or having power over the technology. And Bessent just said, okay, this is so important in terms of statecraft that we’ve got to mention it, bring it up in the summit with Xi Jinping in the middle of May. So they’ve flipped. They’ve done a 180, exactly as you predict. So I think you’re correct. And—okay—and one reason they’re doing that is because of the larger China competition. So talk about the U.S.–China competition in AI, please. Where do you see it today? I know that’s a big question. Well, maybe—I mean, I think actually that it’s—maybe I want to push back on your premise. I think that the reason they flipped is less about China and more about domestic chaos, right? They don’t want the internet to be hacked and, you know, the banking system to crash. It’s not—that’s not necessarily about China. That’s about domestic security. Don’t you think it’s about both? I mean, if these technologies are—so fair enough, it’s about domestic security, but it’s also about China being able to defeat government systems, China threatening both to steal and to disrupt things in the cyber realm. I mean, I think technology has an advantage as a national security advantage. Yes, but I think—okay, we’re going to—I think this conversation is going to go in a direction where we need to clarify one thing right now, which is that there are two kinds of worry about powerful AI in terms like—the big worries, I would say. One is that—and essentially this is about bad guys getting it and doing bad stuff with it. And there’s two kinds of bad guy, right? There’s China. And in 2022, when the Biden team—before ChatGPT, by the way—saw this coming, they put the semiconductor export controls in place because they didn’t want China to have cutting-edge AI, because in their view, the bad guy to worry about was China. And there’s a whole second category of bad guys, which is sort of rogue states, terrorists, criminals, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it’s just very important to clarify that there are two kinds of threat. And I think it’s important to distinguish two ways of dealing with these threats, because in the Cold War analogy

Jack chats with Marty Lederman, professor at Georgetown University Law Center and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, about a recent OLC opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. They examine what is at stake, the statute’s history, and the constitutional arguments behind the claim. They also discuss a lawsuit challenging the opinion and the hurdles it faces in getting to the merits. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack chats with Sarah Isgur about her new book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court . They unpack her theory of the Court’s decisional dynamics and explore the Court’s approach to executive power in the Trump era, which can be seen as both empowering and constraining the presidency on different dimensions. Mentioned: - Sarah Isgur, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court (2026) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

In light of President Trump’s recent threats to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, Jack chats with Professor Curtis Bradley of the University of Chicago Law School about whether Trump has the authority to do so. They discuss the constitutional foundations of treaty termination and the validity of Congress’s 2023 statute that restricts withdrawal absent congressional or senatorial consent. They also examine whether a suit to challenge presidential withdrawal from the treaty could be brought in federal court. Mentioned: Curtis A. Bradley, Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice (2024) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Bob and Jack chat about the war with Iran and Congress’s response. They discuss Congress’s failed efforts to halt the conflict, an emerging proposal for a constrained authorization of force, and the Trump administration’s limited engagement with lawmakers. They examine the politics of the conflict, the role of funding and appropriations, the status of the War Powers Resolution, and contemporary legal debates over military operations without congressional authorization, including the scope of Office of Legal Counsel opinions and the broader shift toward a one-man-decides model of war powers. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack speaks with Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, about his new book, Separation of Powers: How to Preserve Liberty in Troubled Times . They discuss why the executive is the most dangerous branch of government, the importance of responsible executive branch lawyers, and contemporary debates over the administrative state, including unitary executive theory in light of the Trump v. Slaughter oral argument and the major questions doctrine after the tariffs case, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump . Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

In light of the U.S. attacks on Iran over the weekend, Jack speaks with Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, former White House Homeland Security Advisor, about how the U.S. government would normally prepare for domestic threats during periods of heightened risk. They discuss how the federal homeland security enterprise activates in response to elevated threat levels, including coordination across the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the intelligence community, and state and local law enforcement. They also explore concerns about federal capacity, including a DHS funding lapse, resource diversion away from counterterrorism and toward immigration enforcement, and leadership turnover across key agencies. Thumbnail: FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force photo. (U.S. Government Work.) Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe

Jack speaks with Matthew Seligman, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, about the remedial consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. They walk through how tariff collection works, why repayment is not automatic, and the procedural hurdles importers face in trying to recover what they paid, including major barriers to class-wide or aggregate relief. They also examine the practical and political constraints shaping the process, including institutional capacity, litigation costs, and why many smaller importers may never recover their losses. Get full access to Executive Functions at www.execfunctions.org/subscribe