President Trump has been moving swiftly to carry out his agenda—signing a flurry of executive orders and empowering Elon Musk’s task force, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to remake the federal bureaucracy, as it dismantles agencies and pushes out civil servants.

The president is essentially doing an end run around Congress, which holds the “power of the purse,” and Republican lawmakers are, for the most part, urging him to continue.

To Democrats and many scholars, the situation has all the markings of a constitutional crisis: The president is upending the United States’ centuries-old balance of power as laid out by the Founding Fathers.

“The executive branch is expanding its powers beyond what any other administration has tried to do,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking. “That’s the crisis we’re in.”

Read more in the Christian Science Monitor article, “How Trump skirts checks and balances unlike any modern-day US president.”