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 The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced.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. 

President Trump in just two weeks back in office has moved with astonishing speed and boundless ambition to overturn the existing political, economic, cultural and international order in an even more far-reaching way than many of his supporters or critics had imagined possible.
Mr. Trump has thrown the nation’s capital into turmoil by purging enemies at home, attacking allies abroad, shuttering one agency while targeting others, handing the tools of government to an unelected billionaire, ignoring multiple laws, trying to rewrite the Constitution and even flirting with staying in power beyond his two-term limit.
— Peter Baker, February 4, 2025

No living American has seen anything like this from a President of the United States. Nor has anyone in our lifetimes witnessed a Congress willingly abdicate its authority so completely — across the board — to a President. The Republican Party has swept away constitutional checks and balances.

In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second go-round in the White House, Republicans in Congress are willing to play the parts that Trump assigns them while rejecting the role that the authors of the Constitution prescribed.

The First Branch

Article I of the Constitution of the United States creates the Congress, one of three co-equal branches of government with shared powers. The founders sought to establish an effective government while preserving personal liberty. Understanding human nature, they recognized that ambitious men within any of the branches could overstep their authority and threaten our liberty — but that these encroachments could be kept in check by equally ambitious men within the other branches. This would guarantee that the constitutional framework created, with authority shared by the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, would remain in balance. Corruption and attempts to seize power at the expense of the other branches would be constrained.

As James Madison explained (referring to branches as ‘departments’) in the Federalist Papers, No. 51:

In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own…
. . .
It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices…. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others…. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The founding fathers’ ingenious design, inspired by a clear-eyed understanding of human nature, has worked well enough that the Constitution is still in place, with three functioning branches, after more than 235 years.

Skewed incentives

But this framework of checks and balances is falling short in 2025. Although the framers did not foresee the influence of political parties, for much of American history party politics did not unravel the effectiveness of the framers’ design. Presidents acquired extraordinary power over time, but Congress still retained enough independence to serve as a check on the executive. (Mostly, though not comprehensively.) But not now: 2025 is an outlier.

Today the Republican majority that controls both chambers of Congress is shrugging its shoulders as the executive branch encroaches on the legislative branch, while trampling on the Constitution and the rule of law along the way. In deference to their leader in the White House, Republicans have chosen to relinquish the authority and responsibility the Constitution has vested in Congress.

Advice and consent has become auto-consent. Congressional oversight of the executive branch is gone. Exacting retribution at home, threatening our allies, giving a billionaire the keys and codes to federal departments — every senseless whim or wish of our impulsive president gets a pass, along with the lawless pursuit of goals that have eluded the traditional GOP for decades.

The incentives have become skewed by a dominating chief executive who — with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down — can control the fortunes of the legislators in his party. Donald Trump is capable of crushing the personal ambitions of Republicans in the House and the Senate. He (with the assistance of primary voters) has purged the party of dissenters unwilling to accept lies and lawless conduct. Republicans understand their peril if they dare oppose him. Their obeisance to the chief executive prevails over their fidelity to the Constitution. To wit:

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., did acknowledge that an executive branch move to turn off a federal agency “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But he argued that former President Joe Biden took similar steps.
“It’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending,” Tillis said. “Nobody should bellyache about that.”

For ambitious members of the legislative branch, fear and a rational assessment of their vulnerability has changed the calculations that Madison counted on. Instead of preserving the constitutional framework and with it Americans’ liberty, the incentives in play push in the opposite direction.

Grasping for the win

As if Trump’s domination of the GOP weren’t incentive enough, a lawless Elon Musk unleashed by Trump is furiously shuttering federal agencies, shedding employees, and denying funding for the administrative state. In short, he is shrinking government, a longstanding goal of Republicans. That’s an additional incentive and another reason why there’s no bellyaching.

Moreover, as Jonathan Chait observes, this conflict features “an inherent partisan asymmetry” that makes things even sweeter for Republicans:

If Trump and Musk succeed in taking the power of the purse from Congress, they will effectively reset the rules of the game in favor of the right. Congress’s spending powers would be redefined as setting a ceiling on spending, but not a floor. A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.

Rigging the rules

Republicans have chafed at their failure to win elections with an unpopular agenda. So the GOP, powered by the anti-democratic and anti-Democratic animus of the Roberts’ Court, has resorted to voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and an unprecedented deluge of special interest money to win elections.

But even when they win, Republicans haven’t succeeded in shrinking the federal government, since cutting popular programs is unpopular. That’s even more aggravating, which is why fanatics on the right have demonized the Democratic Party, as in “The Flight 93 Election,” — a screed that seemed out of the conservative mainstream in 2016, but isn’t any longer.

Finally, rejecting democracy outright

David Frum warned a year into the first Trump term, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” The events of January 6 confirmed Frum’s view. A majority of House Republicans refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory, as did the rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier that day. An increasing number of Republicans have come to justify even violence.

By now the whole of the GOP has fallen in line with Trump. He can, unchecked by the legislative branch: act lawlessly and empower others to act lawlessly; incite violence and pardon those who employ violence in his name; surround himself with men and women unqualified for public service who are, however, loyal to him. (Partial list.)

What Madison and the framers did and didn’t foresee

Madison recognized that men were not angels. He didn’t expect that officials would inevitably act courageously, place principle before personal advantage, or put country over party partisan interest. On the contrary, he anticipated that ambitious men (and let’s add women, though he didn’t foresee this) — if left unchecked — would likely engage in corruption, greed, power grabs, and other self-serving schemes.

His solution, “Ambition must be made to counter ambition,” relied on ambitious individuals within one branch of government, jealously guarding the authority of that branch and fending off incursions from the ambitious individuals within the other two branches.

This constitutional design, however, is failing us. Donald Trump dominates his party more completely than any president in modern history. Republicans in the Senate and the House fear him and follow him because, if he chooses to do so, he can end their careers. So they dare not challenge him. Every incentive is in his favor and opposed to the constitutional authority of the legislative branch.

The framers were right to focus on personal ambition. The framework they established gave Congress “the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments,” but in 2025 the incentive structure has uncoupled personal ambition from a jealous defense of the legislative branch.

President Donald Trump’s allies, beginning with Elon Musk, are waging a campaign to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do its job on behalf of Americans. No Republican will stand in the way of this campaign of destruction. No Republican will push back against the erosion of congressional authority.

This authoritarian campaign and disregard of the Constitution will stop when the incentives change for Republicans or when Republicans lose their majority. Pushing for those changes is the task of the Democratic Party, its allies, and other opponents of the MAGA agenda.

In my previous post I highlighted the severe damage Trump’s cronies were inflicting on the capacity of the federal government:

Shutting down agencies, blocking distribution of funds, purging personnel throughout the executive branch, and trampling over the Constitution and the law of the land. All of this will have profound long-term consequences. 
And that’s the point. To do permanent damage. To unravel the administrative readiness of the federal government. To render the state incapable of serving working- and middle-class Americans.

I wrote this with a sense of urgency, because if this effort continues apace, it will take only days or weeks for the folks Trump has unleashed to inflict enormous harm. So much so that even with good faith efforts to recover, it could take years or decades to rebuild from the rubble. (And there isn’t the slightest reason to suppose that recovery efforts would take place under favorable circumstances.)

Meanwhile, the world’s richest man and most frenzied oligarch leading the lawless wrecking crew, while incongruously claiming the mantle of democracy, is in a hurry:

We’re never going to get another chance like this.
It’s now or never.

Hysterical reactions like this is how you know that @DOGE is doing work that really matters.

This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like… https://t.co/rwBqcp7veQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

This is a lawless enterprise, so of course Elon Musk, the Project 2025 fanatics, and MAGA loyalists are in a hurry to complete the dirty deed. The Roberts Court, departing sharply from constitutional principles, granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution while in office. Through his pardon power, Trump can exempt everyone acting under his authority from criminal liability as well.

Is this the perfect crime? (Or crime spree?) It’s happening right before our eyes, but can anyone stop it?

The Democrats lack clout.

The Democrats have finally woken up to this crisis, but — locked out by voters in the November 2024 — have little institutional power to push back. They are ▪ trying to get the attention of the public, ▪ preparing to use leverage in their negotiations over the budget and the debt limit, and ▪ turning to the third branch for help by filing lawsuits.

▪ But Musk is immune from repercussions from anyone except Trump, who is gaga over having Musk in his corner drawing monumental attention to the president’s second go-round in the White House. The public is split. The MAGA faction is with Trump, while the Democrats who are alert to the crisis are just not well-positioned to do much more in February 2025 than they were in November 2024.

▪ With the narrow Republican majorities, the minority party in Congress has significant leverage regarding legislation, but this isn’t a legislative battle; the legislative crunch time is a month or more away; and what do laws matter when there is a lawless chief executive who has empowered a rogue agent?

▪ Democratic governors, attorneys general, and other allies will seek judicial remedies. There will be victories (and defeats), but we’ve seen Trump successfully evade accountability for his criminal conduct in the January 6 and classified documents cases. The courts are slow to act; too many judges (and justices) are corrupt partisans; and the tools the judiciary commands are hardly unlimited.

At the moment, this doesn’t feel much like a winning hand. But it’s going to have to do for now.

The Republicans are onboard with Trump’s agenda.

If just a handful of Republicans in either house were to offer objections to Musk’s lawless and unconstitutional power grab, they could at least slow things down. But the incentives (like those of billionaires and corporate America) count against standing in Trump’s way.

If they objected, their careers would be threatened and perhaps their personal safety. There were reports that a number of House Republicans who declined to vote for Trump’s second impeachment because they feared violence directed at them and their families. Such considerations look more likely today, after the Trump pardons of violent criminals, than they did in 2021.

Moreover, Congressional Republicans are aligned with Trump’s war on federal agencies and spending. For decades the Republican Party has sought to limit the regulatory scope of the federal government and to cut taxes to fund these activities. Shrinking government is the party’s holy grail. That’s what Musk is doing on Trump’s watch.

Having come this far with Trump, no Congressional Republican has dared object to the unlawful means Musk has employed to hollow out the federal workforce or to block distribution of approved funding. No one has objected that the process has been reckless or haphazard; that Americans may be denied assistance; that Trump is U.S. is ceding influence internationally; that collateral damage, such as personal data breaches, are likely.

There may be murmurings about this or that, but no Republican dares to raise a hand to put a stop to it. Instead, they stay silent, duck questions about lawless conduct, play whataboutism, or actively endorse what’s going on.

All the while, they await a victory to shrink the size and scope of the federal government. Finally, Social Security, Medicare, EPA, HEW, and other alphabet agencies may be tamed.

It’s no wonder that Republicans haven’t objected to Musk’s methods. Instead they’ve decided to just take the win.

The battle at this early stage on behalf of the rule of law; a robust, effective federal government; and American strength and security is up to the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Project 2025, and the contemporary Republican Party are shredding the capacity of the federal government to do its job — starting with keeping Americans safe and secure.

The mainstream media is so bound by standard journalistic conventions of evenhanded, unbiased reporting it has failed to tell a clear story with sufficient heft. Steve Bannon has explained the winning strategy for the MAGA crew: “Flood the zone with shit.” The media can’t resist the bait, so disinformation and distraction prevail. This time around Trump’s enablers have unleashed a deluge of presidential initiatives (in contrast to Bannon’s trolling and tales) to overwhelm.

If Democrats were speaking out clearly, the media would report that. But Democrats are adrift and have been ever so slow to step up.

Republicans are bound to Trump, whose “Republican allies play the parts he assigns them” (as Barton Gelman observed in another context in November 2020). So, no help from even from ‘serious’ Republicans in the United States Senate or elsewhere.

Garrett Graff — “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government” does a bit of pretending to illustrate the failures of the media and the opposition to communicate the threat:

I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend…

The first two paragraphs of Graff’s report on what’s happening in the U.S.A. as though it were happening abroad are enough to convey the big-picture failure he sees. But he has elaborated convincingly:

Throughout the week’s fast-moving seizure of power—one that seems increasingly irreversible by the hour—neither loyalist nor opposition parliamentary leaders raised meaningful objection to the new regime or the unraveling of the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances. A few members of the geriatric legislature body offered scattered social media posts condemning the move, but parliament — where both houses are controlled by so-called “MAGA” members handpicked for their loyalty to the president — went home early for the weekend even as Musk’s forces spread through the capital streets.

This playbook is not Donald Trump’s.

Donald Trump is ignorant of and indifferent to public policy. His only interest is himself. He’s playing at being king, serving up retribution, and enriching himself. He cares not a whit for the nation’s security or the general welfare or the prospects of democratic institutions going forward. He’ll bask in the spotlight no matter what generates the attention.

But the folks he has let in the door — including Musk and the Project 2025 crew — are crippling the capacity of our government. Shutting down agencies, blocking distribution of funds, purging personnel throughout the executive branch, and trampling over the Constitution and the law of the land. All of this will have profound long-term consequences. 

And that’s the point. To do permanent damage. To unravel the administrative readiness of the federal government. To render the state incapable of serving working- and middle-class Americans. The oligarchs (and even mere corporate and financial interests) mostly just need government to stay off their backs, which  the petty corruption we are witnessing in plain sight will ensure. 

Americans know that government is failing them.

I was struck by a handful of survey responses related to government in the recent New York Times/Ipsos poll. Images from the survey’s Topline and Methodology:

Look at the survey results for Q4., Q5., Q6., and Q7.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.” Can our government respond effectively to this challenge? Is it possible to push back against this tide?

Sixty percent of Americans believe the government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient,” while seventy-two percent believe “government is mostly working to benefit itself and the elites.” (This disillusionment makes agreement regarding a disengaged America, as revealed in Q7., more likely.)

When the federal government fails to do its job(s), the result is cynicism. Failures are guaranteed if the rampages Trump has unleashed continue. Stripping the government of resources and qualified personnel, undermining the rationale of departments and agencies, and misusing the power of the state will accelerate the decline.

Public confidence in government is in short supply. Democrats are the party of government, the party that welcomes public policy solutions to improve our lives. Can Democrats make government work for Americans? A plurality of voters suggested in November 2024 that the party has failed on this score.

Turning this around will be a tall order, made even taller and steeper if the government has been stripped of capacity. Successfully pushing back against the power of the wealthy (which Republicans and Democrats alike agree is too great) will require a responsive, resilient government. The Trump-MAGA crew — led by the world’s richest man — are intent on snuffing out that possibility.

This is a crisis. And it is as if we are sleepwalking through it. The oligarchs, with corporate America and members of the Republican Party, are fine with this. It is up to the leadership of the Democratic Party to step up.

The voters have stripped the Democratic Party of control over all three branches of government. But it is free to communicate, if the party leadership can find its voice.

“The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose,” as Josh Marshall reminds us. “Get to it.”

Post Script: This morning, David Kurtz concluded TPM’s Morning Memo with this excerpt from Timothy Snyder (discussing the “oligarchs around Trump“):

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

The sentence, “The destruction is the point,” immediately brought to mind Adam Serwer’s “The cruelty is the point.” It also crisply expressed the theme — the damage Trump’s MAGA functionaries inflicted on the executive branch over the weekend — I wished to highlight in a post (and which I set about writing).

I didn’t look at Snyder’s Substack piece until after putting up my post. Unsurprisingly, our respective commentaries have little in common, aside from the single sentence that I appropriated as a headline.