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As President Donald Trump tests the boundaries of the power of the presidency, law professors debated the merits of concentrating executive power in the U.S. federal government at the Harvard Law Rappaport Forum on Wednesday.

The event, which was the second Rappaport forum debate of 2025, brought New York University School of Law Scholar in Residence Peter Shane into conversation with Aditya Bamzai, professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. The discussion was moderated by Susan Davies, a former official in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Shane argued in favor of a limited executive power, arguing that the Constitution supports a collaborative relationship between the president and Congress.

“The president’s duty is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Not to execute them, but to make sure that those who execute them are doing it faithfully,” he said.

Shane, who specifically studies the separation of powers in the context of the American presidency, also spoke to the executive’s ability to remove and redesign federal agencies — a topic at the front of mind for many Americans.

“The President could have a power to remove that doesn’t imply, for example, a power to redesign agencies, to move functions from agency to agency or to impound funds,” he said.

His comments come as Trump moves to broadly leverage his presidential power to shrink the federal government and enact policy priorities through executive orders. Most recently, Trump announced staffing cuts to the Department of Education that would effectively cut the workforce in half, advancing his campaign promise to dismantle the department.

Shane spoke specifically to the dangers of giving the executive broad authority to fire federal workers and department heads as another reason to limit the power of the presidency.

“If you say to the president, ‘You can fire anybody,’ you give that idea to a president whose legal understanding may not be nuanced, and lawyers eager to facilitate that president’s every move, the move from I can fire everybody to I can tell everybody what to do,” he said.

On the other hand, Bamzai argued in favor of strong, singular presidential power. He pointed to the historical support for his claim, citing that “the idea of a single executive put forth in the Virginia Plan won out of convention and made its way into our Constitution.”

He added that the Constitution supports broad executive power to fire federal workers and restructure departments, directly countering Shane’s claims.

“The better interpretation of the Constitution acknowledges the presidential authority to remove — that Congress cannot take away by statute,” he said.

Davies said that as the situation in D.C. becomes more complex, the firings provide an interesting lens for continued study and examination of the proper role of executive power.

“In terms of the power of the president to supervise the operations of the agencies that Congress has created by statute, that supervision is manifested most starkly in the President's authority to fire the leadership of these agencies,” she said. “There is no supervision like sacking somebody.”