There’s an arguable constitutional rationale for Trump’s action. House Republicans sued the Obama administration over the CSRs, insisting that they were not specifically provided for under the law, and therefore were an unconstitutional appropriation and that Congress must be involved. Courts haven’t decided that question yet. But it’s hard to take at face value the White House’s solemn invocations of respect for the separation of powers, given, for example, the president’s attacks on the judicial system for striking down his travel ban.

Trump hates Obamacare, but he is also a politician, and he realizes that no matter how many times he says the law is either Obama’s or Democrats’ fault, it will look bad for him if millions of Americans lose insurance on his watch. Trump is taking a gamble by killing the CSRs: He’s assuming that if he kills them, members of Congress will take action to either replace them or else rework the health-care system more comprehensively. Trump doesn’t really want the health-care system to collapse—there’s no indication he fully understands how it works—but he wants to be able to keep his promise of gutting Obamacare. Forcing Congress to clean up the mess achieves what Trump wants.

The same is true when it comes to the Iran deal. Trump is expected to announce Friday afternoon that he will decertify the agreement, which prevents Iran from building nuclear weapons. A law passed in 2015 requires the president to sign off on the deal every 90 days, saying that Iran is in compliance and that the deal is good for American national security. Twice already, Trump has certified the deal, and there’s no evidence that Iran is not in compliance.

The problem is that candidate Trump promised to shred the agreement. He is irked by news stories cheekily pointing out that he has twice certified it, and he’s irked by just having to deal with it every three months. Yet many of Trump’s top advisers think the deal is important, including Iran hawks like Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who said last week that it’s in U.S. national-security interests, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Chief of Staff John Kelly and National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster also seem to think the deal’s benefits outweigh its weaknesses.

Decertification offers a nifty escape hatch for Trump: He can decertify the agreement and then bounce it to Congress, which very well might decide to leave it in place—even fierce critic Representative Ed Royce said this week the United States should remain in the deal—while washing his hands of the matter.

Finally, there’s the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era order known as DACA that allowed unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children to stay in the country under certain conditions. Trump promised during the campaign to immediately cancel the program, but once in office he began to soften. Finally, in September, he announced that he was going to phase it out—but he has repeatedly encouraged lawmakers to pass their own law to achieve the same ends as DACA, and has implied that if they don’t, he will: “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, just told The Washington Post that Trump was willing to extend the deadline.