| There are two weeks to go until Election Day, but lawmakers, congressional staffers, and outside groups across Washington have already spent the last few months gearing up for a major Trump administration oversight push in 2027. |
| Democrats are widely favored to retake the House of Representatives by a comfortable (if not overwhelming) margin, and preparations for that transition are well underway. House Democrats have been adding staff to key oversight committees, and outside groups opposed to the Trump administration have been drafting white papers on potential lines of inquiry. |
| A significant change in Congress is urgently needed. The Republican majority in Congress has badly failed the country by abdicating the legislature’s core constitutional responsibilities and enabling — often encouraging — a historic run of lawbreaking, corruption, and incompetence in the executive branch. |
| If Democrats retake the House, that alone will be both practically significant and historically meaningful, as a much-deserved repudiation of the party currently in power. |
| Still, House Democrats may quickly confront serious obstacles if they retake the chamber — not just on oversight, but on issues as varied as spending, war powers, and Trump’s use of the Justice Department to pursue his political adversaries. |
| In the spirit of getting ahead of things, here is a guide to some of the key flashpoints likely to emerge. |
| 1. The Trump Administration Will Violate Spending Agreements |
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| After the new Congress is sworn in next January, Democrats will want to make some big spending changes, such as restoring funding for health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and social service programs like SNAP that have been cut under Trump. |
| Trump, however, can veto spending measures, and he has already presided over the two longest shutdowns of the federal government in American history amid prior spending disputes. It is not clear whether and to what extent Democrats will be willing to tolerate another long-term government shutdown if they cannot strike a deal with Trump, particularly given that White House officials have repeatedly threatened to use shutdowns to permanently hobble government functions that haven’t already been thrown into disarray by this administration. |
| The bigger problem is that Democrats cannot trust Trump to comply with any spending deal, no matter how ambitious or modest it ultimately turns out to be. |
| During Trump’s second term, the administration has repeatedly violated appropriations laws by unilaterally terminating funding previously appropriated by Congress. The Government Accountability Office has already found six violations of the Impoundment Control Act for programs that Congress funded at agencies like the NIH, FEMA, and the EPA. Trump did it again several weeks ago, when he refused to spend more than $800 million appropriated by Congress. |
| The latest rescission has already generated lawsuits, as will similar efforts in the future. But lawsuits take time and money, and critical services and vulnerable people suffer in the meantime. |
| 2. The Trump Administration Will Impede Oversight Efforts |
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| House Democrats in the majority will get the gavel and subpoena power, but the Trump administration is likely to make things as difficult as possible by refusing to comply with subpoenas or to make administration witnesses available. It may also try to block some subpoenas to people outside the administration — like Boris Epshteyn — on the theory that they are still advisers to Trump whose communications with the president should be protected from congressional scrutiny. |
| Any effort to compel compliance would be difficult under the circumstances. Civil enforcement is time-consuming, and criminal contempt proceedings would be a non-starter under the Trump DOJ. |
| House Democrats have been attuned to this problem since the start of the second Trump administration, given their experience in Trump’s first term, and some Democratic oversight staffers have tried to focus their planning on outside witnesses whom the administration cannot easily stop from appearing. |
| For instance, if House Democrats want to investigate the deals that large law firms struck with the White House last year, they should subpoena Brad Karp and other law firm leaders. (Karp himself should probably take the Fifth, but you get the point.) |
| If House Democrats want to investigate the lack of accountability for federal immigration officials who have killed people, they can call local law enforcement officials whose work has been stymied and the families of the victims. |
| If they want to investigate the impact of destroying USAID, they can call leaders of humanitarian groups whose work has been curtailed — or destroyed altogether — to testify about the people who have already died and who will continue to die as a result of the administration’s callousness and cruelty. |
| 3. The Trump DOJ Will Continue to Abuse Its Authority |
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| A Democratic House will also be hard-pressed to do much to stop Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Trump DOJ from abusing their authority for partisan purposes; harassing and prosecuting Trump’s political adversaries; and, more generally, running the place into the ground. |
| The House can hold hearings and loudly object, but as a practical matter, it will not be able to stop any particular prosecutions or significantly influence the DOJ’s operations at this point. |
| The DOJ might even attempt to prosecute more Democratic lawmakers — in addition to LaMonica McIver of New Jersey (under indictment), Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (under investigation), and the six Democratic members of Congress whom the DOJ tried and failed to prosecute after they made a video urging members of the military to refuse to carry out illegal orders. |
| The Justice Department might also threaten witnesses who testify against the administration with prosecutions for lying to Congress that, while frivolous, are costly, time-consuming, and stressful for the targets. |
| The good news, such as it is, is that time is now a problem for the administration. With a little over two years left in Trump’s term, it is increasingly difficult to envision any new and controversial criminal cases being charged and reaching a verdict — much less sentencing and appeals — before the next administration comes in and dismisses them. |
| 4. The Trump Administration’s Military Adventurism Will Continue |
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| The Trump campaign duped some credulous pseudo-experts in 2024 into believing that Trump would promote military restraint abroad. Since then, the administration has wreaked havoc all over the world — from Iran to Nigeria to Venezuela to Cuba and beyond. |
| This is not likely to end anytime soon. Trump’s war with Iran already violates the War Powers Resolution and international law, but that has not stopped the administration. |
| Trump can also veto war powers resolutions passed by Congress. Even if one somehow passed over his veto, that probably would not stop him from taking money from other parts of the defense budget to fund whatever is at issue (see the first item above). |
