Month: February 2025

Today’s New York Times features a report (“How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy”) on DOGE, providing detail (going back a year and a half) on the destructive effort and clarifying a bunch of stuff for which we already had ample evidence.

In a September 2023 dinner in the Silicon Valley, “Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge.”

The destruction, at the hands of a bunch of computer geeks, is going full throttle.

The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.

When Brad Smith, another billionaire and someone who had worked with Jared Kushner and Amy Gleason (later named acting head of DOGE), advised him on government policy, Musk resisted:

Mr. Musk expressed impatience with Mr. Smith’s caution that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. Mr. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw Mr. Smith’s approach as incremental.

It has been clear from the beginning that government efficiency had nothing to do with the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency. The point was, and continues to be, destruction: to tear down the government to the studs. And Musk’s crusade has been fabulously successful thus far.

His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.

Nothing and no one has slowed things down. Trump could, but he’s all-in. So the destruction continues apace. The damage has been so indiscriminate that many people — including Trump 2024 voters — will be hurt. There will be political blowback.

By that time, though, the damage could be immense.

The President of the United States repeated that phrase several times, as Trump and Vance — like a tag team in the ring with a single opponent — took turns berating the Ukrainian president. Trump, who clearly has the power to turn the tables on Ukraine, has sided with Putin. The United States and Russia are now partners. With the emphatic, “You don’t have the cards!” Trump is rubbing it in, underscoring that Ukraine is powerless to change the course that the president has set for the U.S.

The president stepped in, after JD Vance chastised Zelenskyy for “trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong.” And Trump got this right: “I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on.” Yes, and for the world. Here’s how the U.K reacted:

NEW: The first front pages of Saturday’s newspapers in the UK.“Ukraine Hero Ambushed”“Trump stuns world with vile rant at Zelensky”“A spectacle to horrify the world”Trump is obliterating the global reputation of the US.

— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) 2025-02-28T22:23:31.404Z

Other European allies will respond the same way. As will longtime American allies across the globe.

Most Americans can be expected to respond as our allies will. Except, now that the change is clear, soon enough folks in the Republican Party will switch to Putin’s side as well. Republicans, no matter what came before or what principles they once embraced, inevitably play the parts that Trump assigns. The U.S. is on Putin’s side now.

March 7, 2025 postscript:

A conservative French news magazine brightening up the Paris news stands … hard to overstate the damage Trump is doing to his and USA’s reputation among allies (sic)

— Alastair Campbell (@alastaircampbell2.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T16:22:55.917Z

President Trump, a prodigious liar during his first term, has upped his game in his second. In a brief review, Peter Baker observes that Trump has created “a whole alternative reality to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves aggressively to reshape America and the world.”

Baker quotes a couple of historians on the subject:

“We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.” — Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University; editor of The Presidency of Donald J. Trump)

“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist. Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.” — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University; author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present)

Baker offers a half dozen recent examples (all familiar) of Trump’s fraudulent narratives, which serve to justify something Trump is doing or wishes to do. And Baker cites former Trump aides who have seen up close Trump’s modus operandi.

Mr. Trump’s aides have long recognized his penchant for prevarication and either adjusted or eventually broke with him. John F. Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, has said that Mr. Trump would tell his press aides to publicly repeat something that he had just made up. When Mr. Kelly would object, saying, “but that’s not true,” Mr. Trump would say, “but it sounds good.”
Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Mr. Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir.

Every Trump associate, no matter how high or how low, breathes the same air. Whether one is a White House aide, an agency manager or staffer, a cabinet secretary or member of Congress — you must accept the deceit.

You may be required to affirm it. Current and former officials seeking intelligence or law enforcement positions in the Trump administration have been questioned about two events — the 2020 election and the January 6 riot — featured among Trump’s favorite narratives:

two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

Only loyalists, ready to affirm the lies, can expect to get hired.

Republicans must play the parts that Trump assigns. And every part is drenched in lies.

The United States, at the direction of Donald Trump, has switched sides in the war Russia launched against Ukraine. Trump is partnering with Vladimir Putin. The president has attacked our European allies (and others: north and south of our border and across the globe) and NATO, the alliance that has kept the peace for three-quarters of a century.

Embrace of AfD

And the Trump administration has done a bear hug with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has diminished the significance of Hitler and the Nazi era, thereby prompting a rejection from every other German political party.

Elon Musk — among Trump’s closest allies — has urged Germans to “move beyond” guilt and told more than 4,000 rallying AfD supporters, “I think you really are the best hope for Germany.” Then JD Vance scolded American allies in a speech in Munich for not listening to voters “with an alternative viewpoint,” followed up by meeting with the leader of AfD, and afterward doubled down in a speech to CPAC.

Peter Wehner, addressing the MAGA embrace of AfD writes:

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.
And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

Yes, before you know it (no matter what came before, no matter what principles the Republican Party espoused previously), virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. The men and women of this party inevitably follow their leader.

[“This is a real picture”— Elon Musk]

Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong, and Shane Harris at the Atlantic have a great inside look on what Musk’s raiders are up to (“This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over“). The tech team’s approach: “Radical action was the only responsible course. The improperly fired could be rehired. The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced. The courts might overturn their actions, but that is a problem for another day. Make change happen, and rebuild the smashed shards later, if necessary.”

And long before Musk convinced Trump to let him loose, Project 2025 co-author, Russell Vought, now director of OMB, explained the plan:

Vought called for a return to a pre-Watergate mindset—“a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.” There would be three prongs of the attack, he told Tucker Carlson during a November 18 podcast.
First, “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” Vought said, giving the president complete control of the executive branch to impose his will. Second, the courts must be provoked to smash the idea that Congress directs spending. “Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can’t spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren’t ever meant to be forced to spend it,” Vought said, dismissing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which basically decrees the opposite. Third, the protections of the civil service must end, making nearly all of the federal workforce at-will employees.
This is where Musk entered under the banner of cost reduction, a useful side effect of the larger project. 

Yes, cost reduction is a false flag, though “a useful side effect of the larger project” from the point of view of rich folks who don’t wish to pay taxes and disdain entitlement expenditures — except, of course, they often have outstretched hands when government is dishing out funding. (Musk’s companies have received north of $20 billion from the feds in contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks.)

Inspired by the 500 accounts Musk follows on X

Vought is the big picture guy. Musk and his young techies, in contrast, are just racing this way and that. Jeffrey Goldberg asks how DOGE decides which agencies to target. “This seems to be being done on the fly“– as though Musk is taking direction from accounts on X.

Teddy Schleifer of the New York Times confirms this: “I think that’s literally true. I mean I think that Elon Musk literally is driven by the 500 people that he’s following on Twitter. … And some of these people are pseudonymous accounts.”

“The people who — I know it sounds ridiculous. The people who Elon Musk follows on Twitter are some of the most important people in American culture.”

Drawing on his observations during the transition, Schleifer offers evidence of the perceived influence of the 500. And he describes this scenario: one of the 500 accounts tweets something crazy and unverified; Musk responds, Interesting.

Fine. But in the present day, one of the 500 tweets an idea … and “suddenly the democratically elected president is doing whatever that guy said was interesting.”

Postscript

The images in this post are of Musk at CPAC 2025. Sarah Jeong provides a transcript of “a strange and often inarticulate onstage interview” of Musk by Rob Schmitt (of Newsmax).

A month ago I mentioned the Trump meme coin (“Transactional Trump continues to set records for raking in money” issued on January 17 and designed to line the pockets of Trump, his family, and his cronies.

As of February 11, “More than 813,000 crypto wallets have lost a total of $2 billion after buying President Donald Trump’s meme coin,” while the Trump Organization and its partners have pocketed a cool $100 million in trading fees.

But profiting off unsophisticated fans (I hesitate to say, ‘investors’) is not as significant for Trump as the backdoor the coin offers for unlimited and unseen corruption. In the words of Representative Jake Auchincloss (interviewed this week by Ezra Klein):

Not to be too doomer about it, but Trump issued the Trump coin. And that Trump coin is the equivalent of issuing the account number for a Swiss bank account, telling foreign adversaries they can deposit funds into that account anonymously but then come and show him the receipts privately to prove that they have done so. It is the most brazen act of corruption of the modern presidency.
And if people don’t think that the Chinese and the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris are buying some of that coin, I think they are deeply naive.

Watch closely over the next few weeks and months for changes in public policy directed by Trump to enrich savvy investors (who make money from folks less savvy) behind various cryptocurrencies. The house always wins.

Moreover, because transactions are conducted in secrecy, and Trump is unlikely to permit federal oversight or regulation of the cryptocurrency, bribes from crooked Americans seeking favors and foreigners seeking to corruptly influence U.S. foreign policy will be hidden from view.

Credit a headline in Le Monde for christening the alliance that has introduced a new world order, though perhaps Putin-Trump Axis would be more apt, since Trump inevitably bends a knee to Putin.

Trump has initiated negotiations with Russia, excluding Europeans and Ukrainians, to end the war started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” President Trump said of Ukraine’s leaders. He went on to call President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a Dictator without Elections.”

Dismissing the threat to our European allies, Trump has pledged a U.S. partnership with Russia.

Meanwhile, back home, Republicans have abandoned decades embracing a strong national defense, while opposing the U.S.S.R. and then Russia. Now Republican Senators have changed their tunes or held their tongues.

This shameful, foolish alliance that will damage our country’s security is not just Trump’s policy. This is the foreign policy of the contemporary Republican Party. The ‘serious’ Republican senators (and a smaller sample of House Republicans) we’ve read about in recent years, who put national security issues above partisan politics — they have switched sides or they lack the courage of their convictions.

This is their policy. They can’t escape it. Trump’s siding with Vladimir Putin and pushing away our allies is the foreign policy position of the Republican Party.

Elon Musk – enabled by Donald Trump – is, as I’ve argued, on a tear to destroy the capacity of the federal government, through mass firings and agency shutdowns, to do what Americans expect of it. Beginning with USAID and the CFPB, the Trump administration is on the way to radically redirecting federal policy on immigration, climate, energy, tariffs, DEI and civil rights more broadly (most prominently: gender and transgender rights), health, science, education, consumer protection, and more.

In this post I argue that the courts will not stop Musk and DOGE.

Court challenges

First of all, these activities are unfolding according to plan — as designed by Project 2025. Democracy Docket quoted Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the  American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE),  on November 19, 2024:

Repeatedly throughout the Project 2025 chapters, they say to just move forward, go ahead and implement and worry about defending it in court later. Expect legal challenges, because they know what they’re doing is unlawful.

Other Trump opponents agree that the whirlwind of executive orders is unlawful, which has resulted in a blizzard of lawsuits to put a stop to the wanton destruction. (As of February 19, LAWFARE  had identified more than fifty legal challenges to President Trump’s executive orders.)

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley, on the other hand, is convinced that the administration holds strong cards in this battle. Asked by Brian Kilmeade about a conflict between the State of New York and Trump’s Department of Justice regarding immigration enforcement, Turley addressed the broader Trump strategy:

The interesting thing about this effort is it’s part of an overall effort to get these issues into court, get judicial review, establish what the navigational beacons are and going forward. I like that, because this is an administration on a mission. They want to not waste all the time that they saw just burn away in the first term and instead hit the ground running. So they’ve gone on this sort of full assault across the board. They’re virtually inviting people to take them to court and they also have strong arguments.

I am confident that whatever successes Trump’s critics achieve in court, they will not end Musk’s reckless crusade. The judiciary may nickel and dime  Trump or Musk or Russell Vought on this or that — requiring shifting or recalibrating — but don’t expect nearly enough push back to halt the ongoing demolition.

Design matters

Never mind the great expansion of executive power in the half century since the Nixon era, when we were talking about the Imperial Presidency. Never mind that Congress has willingly acceded power over time to the chief executive. The reason Trump will win the most significant cases in court is because the laws were not designed for the present scenario, as illustrated in Lisa Rein’s illuminating “As Musk reshapes the government, some ask: Where are the guardrails?” in the Washington Post.

Both Congress (in passing legislation) and previous presidential administrations (in their rulemaking) “simply never envisaged” a president acting as recklessly, corruptly, and foolishly as Donald Trump has.

Here’s my quick and dirty summary of Rein’s review:

First, much of the most reckless conduct is not prohibited by law – it is within the president’s prerogative. Often statutory or regulatory prohibitions are aimed at other actors, not at a president. This is because Congress “simply never envisaged” a president acting as Trump, or the folks he has enabled, are doing.

“We’re at a point where things are so unprecedented that it’s not even close to what was envisioned by any of the statutes that exist,” said Nick Bednar, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in the civil service. “We do have guardrails. But they assume moderately bad behavior. They don’t assume complete efforts to assault the traditional institutions of government.”

What’s true of legislation is true as well of rulemaking within the executive branch.  Cybercrimes and privacy laws focus on rogue personnel in government or foreign agents, not on the president, who has wide discretion to act.

Furthermore, the Project 2025 folks have identified rules that “never accounted for the manner in which this White House would use them.” An example: Congress granted presidents authority to hire “special government employees” – to assist in finding the right person for “hard-to-fill jobs, for example in science, technology and engineering.”

Congress did not foresee a billionaire, with conflicts of interest galore and egged on by thousands of fanboys on X, running rampant within the executive branch. And no matter how much we might object to DOGE acquiring sensitive information from federal departments and agencies, the president or his “cabinet secretaries – even acting ones” have the legal authority to permit this.

Further, “Trump officials have found ways to use old laws to their advantage to enact massive changes to the government that Congress did not anticipate when it enacted the post-Watergate civil service law in 1978.” The administration has repurposed that law, which allowed a president to exempt individuals from civil service protections and waive certain hiring procedures, to do something Congress never intended: reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servants – the easier to boot them out and replace them with partisan loyalists.

In each case, Congress passed legislation granting presidents broad authority; this president is acting on that authority in ways unimagined before Trump.

Finally, “Musk and his team have also taken advantage of legal bulwarks with unclear or weak enforcement standards.” In other words, even if they violate the law, in some instances there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Of course, the Supreme Court has the final say regarding judicial decisions, but the current supermajority is hardly prepared to block the wild Musk rampage.

The Roberts Court 

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court ran roughshod over the Constitution to grant presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for laws intended to apply to everyone. This court will not stop Trump from his campaign of destruction, which no Republican dares question publicly.

Let’s first review what the Roberts Court ruled in Trump v. United States. Justice Sonia Sotomayer’s dissent clearly and crisply described the majority decision. In three brief passages:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.
Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, ante, at 3, 13, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

. . .

Setting aside this evidence, the majority announces that former Presidents are “absolute[ly],” or “at least . . . presumptive[ly],” immune from criminal prosecution for all of their official acts. Ante, at 14 (emphasis omitted). The majority purports to keep us in suspense as to whether this11Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024) immunity is absolute or presumptive, but it quickly gives up the game. It explains that, “[a]t a minimum, the President must . . . be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’ ” Ibid. (emphasis added). No dangers, none at all.
It is hard to imagine a criminal prosecution for a President’s official acts that would pose no dangers of intrusion on Presidential authority in the majority’s eyes.

. . .

Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Donald Trump, via his special government employee Elon Musk, is engaged in “bold and unhesitating action.” This is what the Republican majority sought to preserve in its off-the-rails immunity decision. This is, for the partisan Republican majority on the court, reason to celebrate.

It is preposterous to think that the Roberts Court, after giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution — including for ordering the nation’s military to assassinate a political rival — would stand in the way of mass purges of civil servants and shuttering departments and agencies. That’s a nonstarter.

The administration’s Trump card

A few words on defying the judiciary: In September 2021, JD Vance offered advice to Donald Trump (anticipating his 2024 election):

I think that what Trump should do – like, if I was giving him one piece of advice – fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts – ’cause you will get taken to court – and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, “The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”

More recently Vice President Vance and Elon Musk have both challenged judicial authority over the executive branch. So has Trump himself: “But judges should be ruling. They shouldn’t be dictating what you’re supposed to be doing. And why is somebody saying that you’re not allowed to?”

Some commentators have suggested that Chief Justice John Roberts would be certain to rule against Trump were the president to openly flout a judicial ruling. Roberts would assert, so say these observers, the authority of the judicial branch. But I believe this presumption fails to account for a trump card that the president holds.

Trump is a master of the politics of domination and ritual humiliation. The public spectacle of DOJ dropping the prosecution of Eric Adams, which resulted in more casualties than the Saturday Night Massacre, is instructive. The quid pro quo was thoroughly corrupt, while the stakes, with a mayor whose term will end in a matter of months, were much lower than in the Nixon case.

The Adams episode was thoroughly brazen. Just like the January 6 pardons of the criminals who attacked the Capitol police. Just like the Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy nominations; the pivot to what Europeans have dubbed the Trump-Putin Axis; the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. And just like, of course, Musk’s butchery of infrastructure at the heart of the government of the United States.

Trump is accustomed to getting his way. Loyalty to him is paramount. Defiance is costly.

The lesson for Roberts: don’t get in Trump’s way. The president would delight in humiliating the judicial branch, just as he has the legislative branch. It would send a powerful signal. It would raise the president’s popularity among the base of the Republican Party (which the five men on the Roberts Court have served faithfully throughout their careers). It would wound the Supreme Court.

Furthermore, if Trump were to defy the Supreme Court, this might backfire on the Republican Party.

Roberts, if he wishes to avoid humiliation (and not disadvantage the GOP), may erect feeble roadblocks (which will invite workarounds) to Trump, but the Supreme Court will not rule against Trump when the stakes are high.

[Image via screengrab from PBS video of Musk and Trump in the Oval Office.]

The world’s richest man — Forbes places his wealth at $393.4 billion (on February 14, 2025), placing him more than $138 billion ahead of the world’s second richest man, Mark Zuckerberg at $254.8 billion — is waging a fierce campaign against USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.

USAID

Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.
— Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times

USAID funding for FY2023 totaled $43.4 billion (source: Congressional Research Service). That’s less than 1-percent of the federal budget. USAID funding for health initiatives totaled $6.2 billion, representing 73% of U.S. bilateral health efforts (source: KKF).

USAID is an easy first target in the broader campaign to dismantle government. Foreign assistance is hardly popular and most Americans know little if anything about the work of USAID. They’re certainly not focused on babies starving, children dying of preventable diseases, and other calamities that will be brought by the unraveling of USAID. 

(AP has an explainer on the agency’s activities.)

Project 2025

To understand what the Trump administration is doing right now, it’s helpful to look at the Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project launched by the Heritage Foundation. Today’s New York Times observes:

A slew of actions taken by President Trump during his first month in office bear the fingerprints of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government. During his campaign, Mr. Trump distanced himself from the plan, saying it was largely unfamiliar to him.
But The New York Times found more than 60 major moves that Mr. Trump and his administration have made in his first 23 days, including executive orders and agency memos, that align with proposals in the blueprint.

Elon Musk, who Donald Trump has empowered via DOGE, is going well beyond the Project 2025 blueprint, however, in his assault on USAID.

Project 2025’s signature document, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, devoted Chapter 9 to USAID, with a laundry list of complaints: “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.”

That quote touches on familiar enough MAGA themes, but Project 2025 also acknowledged the value of USAID to American foreign policy and praised the first Trump administration with strategic restructuring of the agency. From Chapter 9:

USAID helps communities to lead their own development journeys by reducing the impact of conflict; preventing hunger and the spread of pandemic disease; and counteracting the drivers of violence, instability, transnational crime, and other threats. In alignment with U.S. national security interests, the agency promotes American prosperity through initiatives that expand markets for U.S. exports; encourage innovation; create a level playing field for U.S. businesses; and support more stable, resilient, and democratic societies that are less likely to act against American interests and more likely to respect family, life, and religious liberty.

The Project 2025 blueprint suggested reforms in the second Trump administration to align USAID with Trump’s foreign policy objectives; to counter China’s strength internationally; and advocated replacing Democratic strategies on climate change, DEI, gender equality, religious freedom, and global health (among other issues) with policies to achieve MAGA goals.

But that’s not what we’re getting. Elon Musk and his DOGE team are tearing the whole thing down.

Musk on USAID

“USAID is evil“

“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op“

“USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America“

“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.“

And this boast:
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

On Thursday, Musk spoke to the Worlds Governments Summit in Dubai via videocall:

“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”

Big picture

Elon Musk is waging a cruel campaign against the work USAID does, but he has set out — enabled by Donald Trump — to reach a broader goal: to strip the personnel, culture, and other institutional assets from the U.S. government’s departments and agencies. To rob the federal government of the capacity to do its job, as Americans have every right to expect. On Thursday an estimated 200,000 probationary employees in the federal government were fired. This is part of an ongoing mass purge.

Most federal employees are employed across the country, not in Washington, DC. That’s where most firings will take place. That’s where the effects will be felt. Closer to home for most Americans than the distant work of USAID.

[Screengrab of PBS video.]

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wielding a measure of power surpassing the might of run-of-the-mill oligarchs, is leading a campaign to inflict harm across the globe on human beings struggling with poverty, hunger, disease, and other calamities. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has given him the means to do so.

First up: the destruction of USAID, which is blow to the moral leadership and prestige of the United States; it will inevitably diminish our nation’s strength and security. It represents only a sliver of the damage being done to our country’s capacity to do what Americans have every right to expect it to do. For Musk and his wrecking crew (at DOGE, the fraudulently named Department of Government Efficiency), the evisceration of USAID — chiefly through a purge of its workforce — is a template for their reckless crusade across multiple executive departments and agencies created by Congress.

Both Musk and Trump are telling tales to justify the senseless damage they are causing. They have many powerful allies, including the religious right, the Project 2025 crew, and every elected Republican in Washington.

Presidential power, the Constitution, and the rule of law

Constitutional scholar Peter M. Shane offers historical background to explain, “Presidents May Not Unilaterally Dismantle Government Agencies.” I’ll cut to the chase: The president shares power with two other co-equal branches of government. The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish (and eliminate) federal departments and agencies, as well as the power of the purse (to provide funding or to cut it off). Further, Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress: “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

Trump has diverged from this path, trampling on well-established constitutional principles, Congressional legislation, and judicial precedent.

One knowledgeable observer, Peter Stier, assesses the ongoing destruction in an interview with Franklin Foer.

There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.
Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.
One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.

Corruption all the way down

Musk’s DOGE has reportedly gained access to many federal agencies, including Treasury, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, federal employees have been fired at eleven agencies conducting investigations of Musk’s companies: Transportation, Interior, Justice, Agriculture, National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities and Exchange Commission, Defense, Federal Election Commission, and Office of Government Ethics. Chart from the New York Times:

Elon Musk addresses the nation from the Oval Office

Trump introduces Elon to speak about the DOGE offensive:

I’m going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it. And some of the things which we found were just shocking. Millions and millions and millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think it’s very important. One of the reasons I got elected. I said we’re going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad and that corrupt. And it’s hard to believe that judges want to stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars – much more than that – in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges. Because that’s a very serious – I think it’s a very serious violation.
I’ll ask Elon Musk to say a few words and we’ll take some questions. Elon, go ahead.

Musk speaks:

So at a high level, you say what is the goal of DOGE and, I think, a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. And you may say, aren’t we a democracy? …
So, if there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the President and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.
So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, that we fix that feedback loop and that the public, the public’s representatives, the President, the House, and the Senate decide what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.

The first paragraph in the New York Times report on this Oval Office address aptly summarizes what Musk had to say:

The billionaire Elon Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.”

We had to take the president’s word for the claim that Musk had found “millions and millions and millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse,” and moments later that he had found corruption in the “hundreds of millions of dollars — much more than that.” Not a shred of evidence was offered.

As for Musk’s comments on political theory, his insistence that he — an unelected billionaire, acting in an extragovernmental role — is an agent of democracy… Well, let’s say that’s hard to credit.

This looks more like a corrupt autocrat delegating — contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law — presidential power to a self-serving, unaccountable billionaire with the intent of rendering the United States government incapable of doing its job. That job would be, as envisaged in the Declaration of Independence, guaranteeing Americans the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Trump’s authoritarian quest

On February 11, Trump issued yet another executive order, this one empowering Musk to place a “DOGE Team Lead” within government departments and agencies. A “Hiring Ratio” will facilitate the ongoing purge of qualified, professional personnel:

…the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition (Plan). The Plan shall require that each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart…

An exception is the IRS, where employees will be purged without replacement. Other exceptions where the ratio will be disregarded are agencies focused on “public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.”

This is the furthest thing from the pursuit of government efficiency. This is nothing like an effort to eliminate waste, fraud, or abuse. What we are witnessing aims to rid the government of people with professional expertise, of folks qualified to fulfill the goals of the agencies within which they serve. The actual “Plan” is to replace civil servants with partisan hacks, some of whom might be capable, but all will be selected for their loyalty to a lawless autocrat.

And the most prominent corruption in evidence is found not within the federal bureaucracy. Rather, the corruption is embedded in the Trump-Musk-DOGE-Project 2025-Republican Party drive to strip the federal government of capacity and resilience to serve the American people.

Regime change

This playbook, hardly new under the sun, has been a favorite of foreign autocrats. The DOGE crusade, as Anne Applebaum observes, echoes the mass firings directed by Hugo Chávez and the dismantling of labor protections for civil servants by Viktor Orbán. She writes:

Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

This will come at a great and lasting cost, as Applebaum observes:

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

That’s where we’re headed. And we’re well on our way.