Has any president ever been challenged under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, and what were the circumstances?
Executive summary
No president has ever been removed or formally displaced under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment; the provision has never been invoked, though it has been contemplated or discussed at key moments in modern presidencies (Section 4 has never been used) [1] [2]. Repeated close calls, legal ambiguity about thresholds and actors, and political hurdles have combined to keep Section 4 on the page and off the podium [3] [4].
1. What Section 4 says and how it would work in practice
Section 4 permits the vice president and a majority of the "principal officers of the executive departments" to declare a president "unable to discharge the powers and duties" of the office, temporarily making the vice president acting president while Congress resolves the dispute, and Congress then votes to sustain or reject the challenge [5] [6]. The text is intentionally vague about what constitutes "unable," leaving implementation to the actors specified by the Amendment and to later political and judicial judgment [7] [3].
2. Historical record: never invoked, close calls recorded
Despite episodes of presidential incapacity and political crises, Section 4 has never been used to displace a sitting president; historians and institutional sources uniformly note that Section 4 "has never been used" [1] [2] [8]. Administrations have used Section 3 for planned medical procedures—instances cited include President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush temporarily transferring power during operations—while Section 4 remains untested in practice [6] [1].
3. Notable moments when Section 4 was considered or discussed
Scholars and contemporary accounts record several episodes in which Cabinet members, aides, or lawmakers contemplated Section 4: aides reportedly discussed it during the Reagan years and the Reagan administration "came close" to invoking it in 1981, Michael Wolff’s reporting and later accounts describe White House staff discussing Section 4 during the Trump presidency in 2017–2018, and after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack some Cabinet members and members of Congress urged Vice President Pence to consider invoking it—none of these considerations matured into a formal Section 4 action [2] [3] [7] [9].
4. Why it hasn’t been used: legal ambiguity and political realities
Legal scholars and congressional analyses emphasize two barriers: the Amendment’s purposeful vagueness about "inability," which invites contested interpretations, and the heavy political cost and procedural hurdles—requiring a vice president and a majority of Cabinet officers willing to act, followed by a two-thirds congressional supermajority in both houses to sustain the removal if challenged by the president—making Section 4 politically fraught [5] [4] [10]. Commentators also warn of perverse incentives, such as a president replacing Cabinet members to neuter a Section 4 challenge, a vulnerability debated in legal literature [11].
5. Competing uses of the 25th and the alternatives that explain Section 4’s dormancy
Because Section 3 allows voluntary, temporary transfers (used during medical procedures), and impeachment remains the political-legal route for misconduct, actors have often relied on these alternatives rather than pursue the novel, constitutionally ambiguous Section 4 path; observers argue Section 4 was designed as an emergency backstop but is ill-suited to partisan determination of fitness, so it has remained a theoretical mechanism rather than a practical tool [6] [3] [10].
6. What the record implies for future crises
The historical absence of Section 4 usage demonstrates both its constitutional rarity and the practical barriers to deployment: the Amendment sits ready on paper but untested in decisive application, meaning future invocations would likely trigger immediate legal fights, intense partisan calculation, and institutional scrutiny over who counts as a "principal officer," how to assess mental or cognitive inability, and whether acting officials can be manipulated to tilt outcomes [5] [11] [4]. The sources available do not document any successful Section 4 challenge to a president; reporting and scholarship instead map patterns of contemplation, close calls, and cautionary legal analysis [1] [3].