For the sake of consistency, one would think those concerned about Mr. Musk’s electoral status would also be concerned that any of close to 700 judges in the district courts, none of whom were elected and none of whom enjoy powers enumerated in the Constitution itself, can arbitrarily block the will of a duly elected President on frequently specious grounds.
In an era rife with irony, we’re witnessing a brand new kind in the progressive battle to stop or at least slow down President Donald Trump’s figuratively Sherman-like march through Washington, DC. To hear progressives tell it, the President has absolutely no authority to freeze, pause, or review funding authorized by Congress, especially when the man he has deputized to conduct what is essentially an audit of every government agency is an unelected businessman, Elon Musk. As Mother Jones put it earlier this month, “Nobody Voted for Elon Musk,” claiming a “self-interested, erratic megalomaniac has seized control of the US government.” Clara Jeffery, Editor in Chief began what amounts to rather mindless, repetitive, substance-free rant considering the association between President Trump and Mr. Musk was established during the campaign and well known before any votes were cast, including that the mega-billionaire would have a role in his administration after he himself proposed a “government efficiency commission.” Regardless, she keeps repeating the phrase and tying them both to a complete non-sequitur, “Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants airplanes to fall out of the sky. But after Musk pushed out the head of the FAA and Donald Trump gutted the agency’s safety board, and Musk attempted to push air traffic controllers to quit, the worst domestic airline disaster since 2001 occurred” as though any of those individuals was sitting in air traffic control ten days after the inauguration. Still, she pressed onward like a soldier undaunted, continuing to repeat it five more times as though repetition alone conjures something into reality, before bizarrely and rather blithely acknowledging that by voting for President Donald Trump, the American people did exactly that. For, as even Ms. Jeffery admits, “the concept of DOGE was only floated, vaguely, a few weeks before the election. It was met mostly with ridicule—it was named for a meme coin, after all—and that derision did not ebb when it became evident that Musk (and his erstwhile partner, Vivek Ramaswamy) hadn’t the faintest idea how government spending worked.” What else can you say, except they might well have been laughing then, but there’s no doubt they’re crying, if not screaming, now?
Democracy Now, for example, recently pondered, “Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Unelected Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept. & Other Agencies.” Continuing the ranting theme, they declared, “Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government.” In support of this backwards, almost entirely false notion that a duly elected President cannot grant access to the systems and departments to whoever he chooses, they quoted Waleed Shaleed, a Democratic strategist who hyperventilated, “In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” and then proceeded to ask this deranged individual who believes a President auditing his own government is conducting an insurrection the question point blank as if it had any meaning or substance at all beyond mad man screaming on a street corner, “What do you mean that Elon Musk is staging a coup?” Mr. Shaleed responded in all seriousness, “So, if this story was taking place somewhere in Central Asia or in Africa, the United States media, the United States State Department, international institutions would likely refer to this as a coup. A billionaire industrialist who donated $300 million to a campaign is installing his personal loyalists in key parts of the federal bureaucracy. This is essentially Viktor Orbán’s playbook. And we need to know: Why does a billionaire industrialist, with millions in government contracts, military contracts for his private companies, need the Social Security numbers of every American, needs to know what every single check that the U.S. government gives out to businesses, to charities? Why does this billionaire need to know this information?” This question is, of course, rather easily answered if anyone bothered to give it the slightest thought. Even beyond the proximate cause being President Trump, the recently elected leader of the free world, asked him to and is entitled to pick and choose his advisors as every leader before him, we can answer more substantively: The United States is approaching $37 trillion debt and has been running deficits upwards of a trillion per year even after the pandemic, $1.38 trillion in 2022, $1.7 in 2023, and $1.83 in 2024. It doesn’t take an economist to tell you that these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, substantially so, and significant reform is needed. Generally speaking, when a company or a household looks to reform their spending, they conduct an audit of some kind to determine where the money is going in the hope of identifying either unnecessary or unproductive expenditures. Based on that audit, changes to spending habits are made.
In this case, no one seriously argues that the federal government is a spendthrift by any means. Even Democrats, like Representative Ro Khanna, recently acknowledged that Mr. Musk is likely to find “awful examples of wasteful spending.” At the now-shuttered US Agency for International Development (USAID) alone, DOGE found funding for viral research in Wuhan, sending Ukrainians to Paris for Fashion week, the creation of a Sesame Street in Iraq, farming infrastructure in Afghanistan that was ultimately used to grow opium, Moroccan pottery classes and promotions, including training Moroccans to create and design pottery to sell in domestic and international markets, tourism in Lebanon, a nation our own state department warns against traveling to, and more including a wide variety of transgender and DEI-related programs, all of which President Trump promised to end during the campaign. This has led Senator Joni Ernst, not exactly a conservative firebrand, to declare, “From funneling tax dollars to risky research in Wuhan to sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week, USAID is one of the worst offenders of waste in Washington… all around the world. This is why @POTUS, @DOGE, and @elonmusk are ending the nonsense.” Speaking on Tuesday, from the White House with President Trump seated beside him behind the Resolute Desk (and his son playing with both of them), Mr. Musk himself claimed he has already found a combination of inscrutable accounting processes and potential corruption in who is benefiting. “We do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is, you know, what happened at USAID. We’re just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they’re very good at investing, in which case we should take their investment advice, perhaps. But mysteriously, they get wealthy. We don’t know why. Where does it come from? And I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at taxpayer expense. That’s the honest truth of it.” He continued, “if you look at, say, Treasury, for example—basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the ‘Do Not Pay’ list, that you don’t actually pay it. None of those things are true currently. So the reason that departments can’t pass audits is because the payments don’t have a categorization code. It’s like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building. So you can’t reconcile blank checks. You’ve got comment fields that are also blank, so you don’t know why the payment was made. And then we’ve got this truly absurd ‘Do Not Pay’ list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on. And we’re talking about terrorist organizations. We’re talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation. It can take up to a year to get on the list. And even once on the list, the list is not used. It’s mind-blowing.”
While no one seriously disagrees with this, for purely political reasons, albeit those which might amount to political suicide, the opposition party must oppose, but how can Democrats do so beyond hyperbolic rhetoric and increasingly bizarre rallies when they don’t control either the executive or legislative branches of government? So far, they have settled on the judicial branch, where lower court judges, who are not elected either, can issue stays and restraining orders based primarily on their own preferences, moods, and whims, at least at this point. For the sake of logical consistency alone, one would think those concerned about Mr. Musk’s electoral status would also be rightly concerned that any of close to 700 judges in the district courts, none of whom were elected and none of whom enjoy powers enumerated in the Constitution itself, can arbitrarily block the will of a duly elected President on frequently specious grounds, but as you’ve probably guessed already one would be wrong. On the contrary, many of the very same people who believe Mr. Musk has no business carrying out the business of the President are actively cheering on judges thwarting the business of that same President.
Jen Psaki, former Press Secretary for President Joe Biden, summarized these judicial actions in a recent podcast for MSNBC. “On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts extended the pause on the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to coerce federal workers to leave their jobs. Another federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order to ignore the Constitution and end birthright citizenship — the third judge to do so. Yet another federal judge halted the administration’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health. And the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal ethics agency, was granted a temporary reprieve by a judge after he sued Trump, alleging he was unlawfully fired. All of that happened on Monday alone. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop some aspects of its attempt to shut down the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. On Saturday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE crew from accessing sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.” Setting aside birthright citizenship, which is a complex issue where the President’s powers may well be limited, the idea that a judge can prevent a Chief Executive, who all “executive power of the United States is vested in” according to the Constitution, can prevent the hiring and firing of executive branch staff, or reviews of grants and budgets, is legally and morally untenable, a completely backwards interpretation of our precious democratic norms, but in Ms. Psaki’s bizarre view, this is right and proper because President Trump is showing contempt for that same Constitution. According to her, “some Democrats and legal experts say it leaves us smack dab in the middle of a constitutional crisis. Look, I know phrases like that can sometimes sound vague, abstract and academic. But as I said, this country relies on a system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government. So when the Trump administration ignores that foundational principle, defies the judiciary and dares the courts to enforce their orders, it is a threat to the Constitution itself.” Of course, the Constitution is clear. The debates around the Constitution are even clearer. The Founders envisioned a unitary executive who chooses their advisers, in some cases with the advice and consent of the Senate, in others on their own, not a council of unelected judges, especially highly conflicted ones. For example, Judge John McConnell, Jr., chief judge of the US district court in Rhode Island recently ordered the administration to “immediately restore frozen funding” and threatened criminal charges if they didn’t comply, citing a 1975 case reading “Persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.” In other words, the judge himself might have no basis for the order, but President Trump is guilty anyway. Judge McConnell isn’t a non-partisan actor without motivations of his own, however. Before he was raised to the court, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat campaigns and political action committees and volunteered as director of the Rhode Island Branch of Planned Parenthood. This is the sort of person who should decide the future of America rather than the voters in electing Donald Trump in the first place?
In yet another irony, it seems clear to me at least that progressives should be careful what they wish for by provoking this legal battle. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Congress has blanket powers of the purse, it’s an unsettled legal question how these powers apply when they’ve granted the executive the power to disburse the funds to third parties. Unlike older legislation that specified how the money must be spent, for example the railroad and highway acts detailed exactly what tracks needed to be laid and roads needed to be paved, this more modern approach to appropriations positions the executive as a sort of broker or loan officer, giving them discretion in who gets the money and how much. Putting this another way, Congress hasn’t declared that millions get spent on Moroccan pottery. They have left that decision to the executive, and it seems a pretty straightforward legal argument that the executive can simply decide no one meets the criteria to receive the money, the same way a loan officer rejects your application for a mortgage. Especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions that have required executive branch agencies to comply with the terms of their original legal authority, it seems reasonable they will follow that logic to conclude that if Congress wanted Moroccan pottery funded, they would have said so. Ultimately, we might well end up with President Trump having even more power than he’s asserting on his own, which of course would be the ultimate irony.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 