Supine, submissive and subordinate: Congress and the Musk coup
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As Jamelle Bouie [gift link] observes, what Elon Musk is doing to the federal government would be quite illegal even if someone had actually elected him to something:
Even if anyone had elected Elon Musk to anything, the past week would still be one of the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.
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.
The theory reflected in the structure of the Constitution is that Congress should protect its prerogatives against a rogue agent in the executive branch, but obviously that’s not happening:
The thing, of course, is that Musk isn’t elected. He is a private citizen. He was neither confirmed for a cabinet job nor formally appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He does not even have a presidential commission; he has been designated a “special government employee.” Musk says that he is acting on the authority of the president of the United States. Even still, it is not as if the president of the United States has the authority to unleash an unvetted, unaccountable private citizen onto some of the most sensitive data possessed by the federal government.
But that is the situation. 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.
A crucial problem here is that the framers being in denial about the existence of political parties means that checks and balances in the Constitution don’t work as they intended. In practice, the Madisonian separation of powers often means the evasion of responsibility rather than the strong assertion of institutional authority. And in this case, Congressional Republicans — most of whom have ideas about how the government should work that are as stupid and unworkable as Elon’s but feel politically constrained from voting for them directly — see an opportunity to get their way without the pesky need to take public votes.
The one shred of optimism I can give you is that another consequence of strong parties and elite polarization is that all federal elections are national, which means that the unpopular actions of the Musk administration will hang on congressional Republicans. If there are free and fair elections in 2026, which brings us to the problem that no constitutional system can effectively deal with a political party that just doesn’t believe that it should be subjected to legal restraints.