When Donald Trump took office five years ago, White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon vowed that the new president would wage an unending battle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The Supreme Court’s apparent readiness to block President Biden’s vaccine mandate for large companies, which will otherwise go into effect Monday, underscores the likelihood that Trump’s legacy, by remaking the judiciary, will include declawing the federal bureaucracy and hollowing out its regulatory authorities.

In 1970, Congress passed — and President Richard M. Nixon signed — the law creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This was 52 years after the flu pandemic of 1918. Coincidentally, it was also 52 years before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday on whether that agency has the power amid another once-in-a-century pandemic to require vaccinations at U.S. businesses with more than 100 employees.