Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback.
Musk’s team, which includes a small gaggle of young aides, reportedly ages 19 to 24 — have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They also have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which provides a direct line to sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank accounts. By his own account, Musk could use his access to the payments system — which disburses congressional appropriations to the many payees of the government — to effect a kind of personal line-item veto. If he does not believe that a program or grant is effective — if he thinks that it constitutes “waste, fraud and abuse” — then he will cancel its funding and leave it to starve on the vine.
The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing.
“When you see prices go up at the grocery store, the prices are going up because of excess government spending,” he said in an online conversation with, among others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “It’s very important to connect these dots. The supermarkets are not taking advantage of you. It’s not price gouging; it’s that the government spent too much.” (This, it must be said, makes no sense.)
Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.
…
A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States. The public has no guarantee that its most sensitive data is secure. At best, they have the personal word of Donald Trump, which, paired with a few dollars, might buy you a cup of coffee.
The only institution capable of responding to this with any alacrity is Congress. But Congress is also led by Republicans, and both the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, have declined to take any steps to arrest the president’s illegal arrogation of power or Musk’s destructive effort to run the federal government. Thune and Johnson, acting with the support of Republicans in both chambers, have, in effect, renounced their power over the purse and abnegated their powers of oversight. Their Congress is supine, submissive and subordinate, less the equal of the president than a tool of the executive branch — a subject of his will.
Somewhere, King Charles I is jealous.
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.
If Trump, Musk and their allies — like Russell Vought, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget and a vocal advocate of an autocratic “radical constitutionalism” that treats the president as an elected despot — succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.
The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.
Now the judicial system will weigh in on the situation. As lawsuits are filed, it will try to adjudicate claims of lawful authority and executive power. And thanks to the efforts of Democratic state attorneys general, there has already been an injunction against the president’s effort to freeze federal funding. But the courts are slow-moving and reactive, and as we wait for the federal judiciary to make its moves, Trump and Musk are creating facts on the ground.
From Jamelle Bouie, NY Times Opinion
Feb. 5, 2025