No one is against President Trump and de facto prime minister Elon Musk cutting waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, but how they go about that must be legal and logical and Musk’s ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency isn’t either.
Musk stood next to Trump’s desk in the Oval Office Tuesday as the president signed an executive order that purports to vest “DOGE team leads” at every federal department and agency with the effective authority to reduce the workforce, sign off on all hiring decisions and block the filling of positions in the agencies. And so, DOGE — the rebrand of an entity that was started to provide technical assistance in the federal government — inches closer to being a full shadow government, although it was never authorized by Congress.
Musk and his team seem at best to be completely misunderstanding the basic workings of the federal government and at worst just not caring. This is unsurprising for people who, whatever convictions they might have about their own intelligence and skill, have no experience or apparent interest in what the agencies they’ve been given free rein over actually do and, in the case of Musk, retain enormous private financial stakes in how the government operates and contracts.
Musk’s meddling in FEMA led to four staffers, including the agency’s chief financial officer, being fired and publicly thrown under the bus for disbursing pre-approved funds for NYC migrant shelter operations and $80 million already sent here being withdrawn from city bank accounts.
Almost every single part of the narrative presented by Musk and Homeland Security was outright false — $59 million did not come out of FEMA’s disaster relief fund; the funds were not going to people considered by the federal government itself to be “removable or illegal aliens”; they were not disbursed unilaterally by the fired employees; and they did not go to “luxury” hotels or even primarily to housing.
Using DOGE, with Trump’s implied consent, Musk can turn his tweets on his own social media network into action, which is what happened with the FEMA firings. All based on something that wasn’t true. Oh, well.
Due process and fair play have no role as federal departments jump at his commands, even if the actions violate the law in retaliating against agency personnel who are merely acting on Congress’ and the courts’ directives. Trump’s latest executive order will only supercharge this dynamic, giving Musk and his handpicked set of political commissars — and let’s be clear that this is what they will be, enforcers of Musk’s political vision and preferences — authority above even Senate-confirmed department heads.
We hope this isn’t news to anyone, but in case you slept through grade school civics, the United States does not have a prime minister, nor can the president simply create one via executive diktat. The branches of government are also supposed to be co-equal, which means that a set of executive branch employees without any statutorily-created authorities cannot usurp the power of the department heads, block funding that Congress appropriated, and direct agency staff to ignore federal court orders.
The courts are pushing back and sooner or later, and we hope sooner, the Republican Congress will have to defend its authority from executive overreach.