It was designed for this. The safeguard is supposed to be Congress protecting their own powers out of self interest. They aren't. That's the where the "framers" screwed up.
I think the problem goes deeper than that, for two reasons.
The first is the obvious one. Congress is captured by a bunch of ineffectual assholes that either don't care enough to stop this or actively support ceding power to the executive.
But the second is that Congress has no actual enforcement mechanism. There are a few Congress members that are trying to stop this, but the executive can just play games with the court and lock out Congress members from any sort of oversight. If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the country, who has control to stop it?
My two cents. Congress has a singular enforcement mechanism: impeachment.
If the Congress refuses? A constitution doesn't envision the government ceasing. What happens next requires a lot of imagination because it's not written in any text.
There's an example of Principate from when the Roman republic ceased and the empire began. It had the veneer of a republic, and maybe it fooled some people, I don't really know. But today it's considered an empire, not a republic, for the > 250 year period of the Principate. It was an autocracy, with an emperor. The senators were decoration.
To quote the article: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
They've been preparing themselves to ignore judicial rulings and they may well do that.
