Theories of presidential success find that political disunity reduces the President’s effectiveness by restricting his authority to generate new policies. We maintain that focusing solely on policy change neglects the influence exerted by the President when he defends his policy agenda by preventing unfavorable changes to the status quo. We develop a new theory of presidential success that predicts that certain political environments raise the resource costs to the President of policy change. During these times, the President shifts political resources to defending the status quo. We empirically test our predictions in both legislative and regulatory lawmaking, and find strong support for our theory.