President Donald Trump is poised to address a joint session of Congress on March 4, the first-year equivalent of the annual State of the Union address. Whatever one thinks of this administration’s policies and many executive orders, the presidency has grown too powerful, and reformers from every political party should work to pare it back.

If America’s Founders had one overriding principle, it is this: Don’t put too much power in one place. As we approach 2026 and America’s semi-quincentennial (quarter millennial), celebrating 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it’s an apt time to realize the center of power has long since moved away from the states and toward Washington, to the detriment of us all. And within Washington, power has increasingly centralized in the president at the expense of Congress and the judiciary.

For his part, Trump has already usurped Congress’s power of the purse to impose trade tariffs, and he has floated the idea of creating a sovereign wealth fund without Congress. He can cite a precedent as recent as President Joe Biden’s attempt to spend $400 billion on student loans without congressional involvement. When courts blocked Biden, he continued the same policy, in smaller chunks.

Before that, President Barack Obama infamously pledged to use his pen and phone when Congress threatened to block his policies. Before that, President George W. Bush started two wars without congressional approval, one more than his father. Going back even further, President Woodrow Wilson jailed political opponents during World War I in violation of court orders.

Trump’s annual speech itself is arguably an indicator of burgeoning presidential power. Thomas Jefferson transmitted his State of the Union addresses to Congress in written form, partly because he felt that appearing in person before Congress looked too much like a king pressuring the legislature. Jefferson’s tradition of respecting congressional independence continued for more than a century until Woodrow Wilson, whose grand views of presidential power mirror Trump’s, began giving in-person speeches annually.

The separation of powers is one of the most essential principles in American government. Yet, there are also political and economic reasons to oppose unilateral presidential policymaking. One is the yo-yo effect. While it is easy to enact sweeping policy changes via executive order, it is just as easy for the next president to overturn them. The result is policy whiplash every time there is a change in power, on issues ranging from environmental policy to labor regulations. This instability discourages investment and slows innovation and growth.

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For example, many of Trump’s first-term executive orders on regulation were overturned by Biden on his first day in office. Now, some of those same orders are back in effect, and the odds are the next Democratic president will overturn them again.

Tariffs provide another example. The Constitution gives all taxing powers to Congress and none to the president. In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress delegated its tariff-making powers to the president for expediency reasons. Trump has used these powers to impose tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods, often announced on social media with little to no notice and certainly with no congressional input.

Congress hasn’t raised tariffs since the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that worsened the Great Depression — and for good reason. Trump’s 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs, for example, created 1,000 jobs in those industries but cost 75,000 jobs in steel- and aluminum-using industries ranging from autos to beverages.

Trump’s speech to Congress will inspire and provoke. There should be one thing everyone can agree on: the presidency has grown too powerful.

Congress rightly has sole legislative and spending power, not the president. To restore constitutional government, Congress must either codify Trump’s executive orders in legislation or repeal them outright, on a case-by-case basis. And the courts must stop unconstitutional behavior from Congress and the president while upholding policies that are constitutional.

The state of our union is that America is in good shape. However, our Founding institutions are undergoing another stress test. It is up to Congress, the courts and to each of us to see that it passes.

Ryan Young is a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

“Every few weeks,” wrote one of our more interesting critics, Walt Zlotow, on his Substack last spring, “the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board publishes an editorial misrepresenting the war in Ukraine.”

Zlotow’s complaints included this statement in an editorial, also published last April: “We have never wavered in our support for the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression, stretching back to the beginning of Putin’s brutal, illegal war. We’ve never heard any reasonable argument to the contrary.”

In that piece, we lauded Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, for potentially risking his job by pushing continued Ukraine aid over the objections of Republican “firebrands.”

Zlotow disagreed, writing: “It’s the Trib Editorial Board Members that wear the moniker ‘firebrands’ for engaging in radical promotion of endless war destroying Ukraine.”

Since the election of Donald J. Trump, a president with far too cozy a relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zlotow’s views have become more common, especially in MAGA circles. Zlotow makes the ascendent point of view better than most: The Tribune editorial board “knows the war is hopeless. It knows that continued war will simply kill hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers. It knows negotiations are the only way this war will end.”

Well, it’s been more than a few weeks and we are back again, in a city that has quietly welcomed thousands of Ukrainian refugees, to reaffirm the statement of our never wavering support for the people of Ukraine.

And, for that matter, for the people of the Republic of Georgia, who have been watching the war in Ukraine with growing horror, realizing that their own fledgling democracy is yet more vulnerable to the same force, to the same man with a friend now back in one of the world’s highest places, if not the highest.

Yes, we know that war extracts a terrible price. We don’t view Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as some kind of saint, nor do we doubt for a moment that some of the money America sent to defend Ukraine has been wasted or siphoned away by bad actors. It was ever thus. And Zlotow is right when he says that negotiations will be necessary to end the war, just as has been the case with most any war humans have ever fought.

We’re glad Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others are engaging in that process and we’re even open to the notion that whatever special relationship Trump claims to have with Putin might be helpful in weaning him away from China and back more into a place where his name does not strike fear and loathing into so many. All true.

But let’s not engage in some Orwellian rewriting of history to do so. And let’s not forget that if tyrants are allowed to send tanks rolling across borders not their own without invitation and with expansionist ambitions, the world must rise up in support of their quarry, lest said tyrants decide a few more borders could also fall with the right kind of violent coaxing. The MAGA crowd are very conscious of the movements of unauthorized migrants; why must they be so enabling of Putin’s far more dangerous excursions? It defies logic.

So when the U.S. voted with Russia against a United Nations General Assembly resolution Monday that was criticizing Russia for its aggression against Ukraine of three years ago, we say “for shame.” All peace-loving people should want an end to this war, and the realities of Realpolitik means that will come with a price we will have to swallow, but it’s a bridge way too far for the U.S. to formally balk at the notion that Putin started this war.

So let’s be clear. Again.

Russia invaded a sovereign nation. Period. Any zeal to end the war must not compromise a fair and full acknowledgment of how this particular war began. If this was a tactical appeasement decision on the part of Trump, Rubio or anyone else, and there can be no other explanation not too terrible to contemplate, it was both a dangerous and a morally bankrupt one.

All Americans with actual, functioning memories know that. So do the Ukrainian and Russian people. And so do we.

— The Chicago Tribune

By MEG KINNARD and KEVIN S. VINEYS, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civilian federal jobs are being cut by the thousands, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues to shrink the government workforce at the behest of President Donald Trump.

That’s brought a lot of churn and uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where 20% of the country’s more than 2 million civilian — or nonmilitary — federal workers are located.

It’s also affecting workers and communities outside the Washington, D.C. area, where about 80% of that workforce is based. Those cuts mean that members of Congress are now facing potential angst among the out-of-work federal employees in their districts across the country.

The precise locations of all of the thousands of federal employees now out of work isn’t yet known, but a look at the areas with the highest concentrations of civilian U.S. government jobs gives a glimpse at some places that could be most affected.

Here’s a breakdown of federal government jobs across the country by the numbers, surveying data from a Congressional Research Service analysis of Census Bureau estimates, as of 2023:

D.C. area, represented by Democrats, has highest federal worker concentration

It’s no surprise that the District of Columbia has the highest percentage of federal workers, who account for 18.5% of the total workforce.

And the areas immediately outside the city, in what’s known as the DMV — which includes Washington and parts of Maryland and Virginia — are next up with the highest concentrations of federal workers, with the top nine districts where percentages of federal workers range from 18.2% down to 8.4%. Most of those districts are represented by Democrats, meaning that some of the areas — albeit those in the D.C. area — likely to have the most significant impacts from DOGE cuts are represented by that party in the U.S. House.

The one with the highest percentage of federal workforce is Maryland’s 5th District, represented by Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer. There, about 18.2% of all workers are employed by the federal government.

Republican districts are affected, too

After the districts closest to Washington, D.C., there are GOP-represented areas with high federal worker percentages.

Virginia’s 2nd District, represented by Republican Rep. Jennifer Kiggans — along the state’s southeastern border with North Carolina — is the GOP area with the highest concentration of federal workers, at 8.1%. Home to Virginia Beach, and a large U.S. Navy presence, it’s considered among the nation’s most politically competitive districts.

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Central Oklahoma’s 4th District, represented by GOP Rep. Tom Cole, has a workforce where 7.7% is employed by the federal government. The district is home to Fort Sill Army Post and Tinker Air Force Base, the latter of which includes the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex. Oklahoma’s largest single-site employer, according to Tinker’s website, the complex provides support for dozens of other Air Force Bases.

Federal employees make up 7.6% of the workforce in Alabama’s 5th District, which includes Huntsville and is represented by Republican Rep. Dale Strong. The area encompasses NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which has had a role in rocket engineering and U.S. space exploration efforts from the Saturn rockets integral to moon missions, the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station’s laboratory modules.

The data examined here doesn’t pertain directly to military jobs. Thousands of civilian government employees across the country work in areas near or attached to military installations.

Alaska, represented by an at-large Republican, has a high concentration

Alaska’s sole U.S. House member, Rep. Nick Begich, represents a state with a total federal worker percentage of 6.3%.

Scott Goldsmith, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, has described the state’s economy as a “three-legged stool” kept balanced by three components: the oil and gas industry, the federal government, and then all other industries combined.

The federal government manages a significant amount of land in Alaska. Workers are employed by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service, among others.

New Mexico has highest percentage of federal workers across all districts

All three of New Mexico’s House districts are represented by Democrats, and all of them have significant federal workforces.

Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, two major federal research institutions, are located in the state, where the federal government is the No. 2 largest employer, according to the New Mexico Partnership.

Percentages of federal workers across the districts range from 6.3% in Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez’s 3rd District to 6.2% in Rep. Gabriel Vasquez’s 2nd District. In the 1st District, represented by Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury, the workforce is 6.8% federal employees.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press

A new government report adds to evidence that the HPV vaccine, once called dangerous by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is preventing cervical cancer in young women.

The report comes after Kennedy pledged to give a family member any fees he might earn from HPV vaccine litigation. In a 2019 video posted on the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense website, Kennedy called Gardasil “the most dangerous vaccine ever invented.”

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The new report found that from 2008 to 2022, rates for precancerous lesions decreased about 80% among 20- to 24-year-old women who were screened for cervical cancer. The estimates were published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

HPV, or human papillomavirus, is very common and is spread through sex. Most HPV infections cause no symptoms and clear up without treatment. Others develop into cancer, about 37,000 cases a year, according to the CDC.

Women in their 20s are the group most likely to have been given the HPV vaccine, which has been recommended in the U.S. since 2006 for girls at age 11 or 12 and since 2011 for boys the same age. Catch-up shots are recommended for anyone through age 26 who hasn’t been vaccinated.

Jane Montealegre of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in the study, called the decline dramatic and said it can be attributed to the increasing use of the safe and effective HPV vaccine.

“This should reassure parents that they’re doing the right thing in getting their children vaccinated against HPV,” said Montealegre, a cancer-prevention researcher.

Other countries also have reported declining rates of cervical precancer in younger and more vaccinated cohorts, she said. The U.S. doesn’t have a national registry but estimates what’s happening across the country by monitoring five sites.

Kennedy’s financial relationship with litigation against the maker of the HPV vaccine came under scrutiny during his confirmation hearings. The health secretary has since told lawmakers that he has referred hundreds of clients to the law firm suing vaccine-maker Merck in an arrangement where he would be entitled to 10% of contingency fees awarded.

One of Kennedy’s sons, Conor, is an attorney at that law firm, WisnerBaum. In an amended ethics agreement, Kennedy said he will give any fees he earns from litigation over the HPV vaccine to “a nondependent adult family member.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.