In parliamentary systems, winning an election gives one party control of both legislative and executive powers. This means there are big policy swings after elections when parties switch. In the United States presidential system, the separation of powers combined with legislative chokepoints—like the Senate filibuster—means that opportunities for very large policy swings are much less common.

Even during times when the President is the same party as the majority of both the House and the Senate (a governing trifecta), the weirdness of Senate procedure (specifically the reconciliation budget process that allows one big budget bill per Congress to escape the filibuster) generally means that parties get one chance to affect a major policy change each congressional session.

In recent decades, the Republican strategy for this presidential system with chokepoints has been clear: using their reconciliation chances to cut taxes for the rich and corporations when they have a trifecta and using legislative blocks (often the Senate filibuster) to stop any tax or social spending increase when there is a Democratic president. The Democratic thrust has been largely the opposite: financing new spending programs (like the Affordable Care Act or the Inflation Reduction Act) by raising revenue from the rich when they have a trifecta in power and using legislative blocks to stop steep cuts to valuable federal spending programs or taxes on the wealthy when they can.

The net outcome of these two directly conflicting strategies has been near stagnation in federal revenue and spending for decades. But this stagnation actually demonstrates a highly asymmetric power to stop needed progress that benefits the right-wing policy agenda.

Throughout history, rich nations have seen an upward drift in the share of national income accounted for by public spending. This regularity is clear in international data and even has a name: Wagner’s law.

This rise in public spending is not creeping socialism, but a function of the fact that key needs—like retirement and disability insurance, health care, and education—are best provided as public goods. As a country’s population ages, it spends more money on mechanisms to ensure income for those who can no longer work. And as nations experience technological advance, health care gets more expensive and the population needs more education. None of this necessarily restricts a nation’s economic growth; it just means public institutions are needed to ensure that growth leads to prosperity that is broadly shared rather than sharply concentrated.

A presidential system with multiple veto points means that this need to adapt and increase public sector capacity is throttled—a dynamic that has been labelled “policy drift.” This throttling causes economic distress for typical families as it prevents the public sector from being agile in responding to key challenges in their lives. This in turn feeds a growing cynicism about the capabilities of government: As state capacity erodes, public welfare suffers and people become more cynical. Further, as people see rich people paying too low taxes (due to constant Republican efforts) and public services continuing to lag, their faith in effective government erodes. All of this is to the political benefit of a party committed to keeping taxes low for the rich and devaluing the worth of the public sector.

Given the current Republican trifecta, one might have assumed that they would use the budget reconciliation process to pass one big set of changes, but then the filibuster-limited back-and-forth on the size of the public sector would have continued for the next two years. Focusing just on Congress, the expected playbook of tax cuts mostly for the rich paired with steep spending cuts for vulnerable families is moving forward quickly through reconciliation. Even this “business as usual” scenario would do grave damage to the most vulnerable Americans.

However, the illegal actions of DOGE have added a far more dangerous angle to this asymmetric ability of the right wing to halt needed progress. It used to be that the right wing could just hold the line against Wagner’s law and do damage by stopping needed adjustments to the public sector. Gouging too much deeper than that was largely constrained by the many legislative blocks that exist in the U.S. political system. Now, however, if they’re allowed to use extraconstitutional means to affirmatively destroy existing state capacity—that is, to undertake spending cuts that have not been legislated by Congress—the asymmetry between the parties’ functional power in the presidential system will explode. Besides end-running the filibuster when Republicans have a trifecta, it would also mean that any time there is a Republican president they can continue destroy state capacity even if the Democrats hold Congress.

What could possibly be a Democratic response to this new, illegally driven asymmetry that would not also be wildly authoritarian or dangerous and yet would keep resources to the public sector from imploding? When they have the presidency, should they take full control of the Federal Reserve into the presidency and demand the Fed create money to finance new programs if Congressional procedures block revenue from being raised? Should they create an armed paramilitary tax collection police that storms the houses of the wealthy and corporate owners to demand arbitrary tax payments or their private passwords to financial accounts? Of course, they should not do anything this dangerous—but absent something this reckless, they will completely lose the ability to construct and maintain a functioning public sector in the face of the anti-constitutional efforts of DOGE.

There are many reasons to think that a parliamentary system would be better than our current system of separated powers and legislative chokepoints. Elections should matter more for policy content than they have in recent decades in the United States. But the worst of all worlds is a “system” where only (illegal) cuts to public capacity are allowed to bypass legislative chokepoints—while public capacity expansions remain blocked. We would see a perpetual downward ratcheting in the ability of public action to address key problems. This worst-of-all-worlds scenario is the one we will be in if DOGE’s decisions are allowed to stand.