February 8, 2025 - 5:00pm
A new ruling from a D.C. judge has put a temporary pause on the Trump administration’s plan to gut the US Agency for International Aid (USAID). This ruling indicates the deepening structural conflict of the United States Government as the President’s project of maximal disruption gets underway.
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have been marked by a “shock-and-awe” strategy, in which the President and his top ally Elon Musk have tried their hardest to shake up the status quo. While Musk’s DOGE tries to make cuts from one federal department to the next, the President has issued a barrage of executive orders on everything from birthright citizenship to affirmative action to freezing appropriated funds.
But Trump’s model of the president as prime disruptor has, naturally, started to generate friction. So far in Congress, Democrats have only been complaining, not planning legislative action. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, so Democrats have been consigned to photo ops in front of federal buildings and angry posts on Bluesky.
However, now the courts are meeting “shock and awe” with “wait and see”. Reagan and Biden appointees have paused Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The administration’s attempted funding freezes have also been temporarily blocked by the courts. Continuing that trend is Friday’s injunction on the administration’s proposal to place thousands of USAID workers on administrative leave. A Trump appointee and a Federalist Society member, the judge in the USAID case has not made a final ruling. Instead, he has only placed a limited injunction.
Still, even a temporary hold interferes with the pedal-to-the-metal pace. Given the sheer amount of the new administration’s actions, the legal opposition has struggled to keep up, but now the courts could start to slow that rate of disruption down.
This collision between the presidency and the judiciary could augur more conflict in the days ahead. The separation of powers under the Constitution by definition sets up a conflict between branches, and many of these cases turn on questions at the heart of executive power. For instance, where does Congress’s power to appropriate money stop and the president’s ability to manage the executive branch begin?
There are other possible battlegrounds over executive power. Trump’s recent decision to remove a member of the National Labor Relations Board is viewed by some as a pretext for a bigger legal gamble: to get Humphrey’s Executor v. United States overturned. This landmark 1935 ruling gave Congress a relatively broad ability to create independent executive agencies, the leadership of which the president could not fire at will. Overturning this case would significantly expand the ability of the president to intervene in federal administrative agencies. A 2020 Supreme Court ruling (decided 5-4) has already begun to limit the application of Humphrey’s Executor, so further enhancements of presidential power could be in the offing.
The courts will be tasked with addressing those kinds of questions, and any legal answer could invite further escalation. For years now, some prominent Democrats have mounted a campaign to delegitimise the nation’s courts. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse regularly invokes the “captured court” and has said that he expects many of these cases to land eventually at the Supreme Court. Rulings that end up ultimately upholding some of these Trump actions could ignite a furious response from the Left — and a judicial barricade of these actions could inspire ire from the populist Right.
The growing polarisation of American politics has put increased pressure on its political institutions. As a tribune of the identity-politics Left, Joe Biden’s attempt to overturn limits on his power culminated in an endorsement of progressive “court reform” and a bizarre attempt to “affirm” a Constitutional Amendment into existence. While Trump’s victory in 2024 might have demoralised the so-called “resistance,” underlying conflicts remain. The struggle between the branches of the US Government can temper political conflict but also magnify it.
The perennial war over the Constitution is continuing apace.
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SubscribeThe separation of powers has long been seriously compromised by the Progressive ‘long march’ through American civil society. However you choose to describe it – social justice, virtue signalling or woke, the Progressive groupthink mental virus has, over the last few decades, achieved a colonisation of every single institution of civil society in America. As I wrote here:https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers The legal profession is no exception They have been groomed, at the West’s most prestigious schools and universities, to such pitch-perfect self-righteousness that it would never even occur to them that they might be imposing their particular version of Liberalism on a public with little realistic means of democratic resistance. Dismantling Progressive lawfare will, in the longer term, be Trump2’s biggest challenge. I just hope it can win that battle.
> Overturning this case would significantly expand the ability of the president to intervene in federal administrative agencies.
Good the administrative state has been one of the leading causes of the collapse of western civilization and the mess we find ourselves in. The ability to create laws is limited to the legislative bodies, having arbitrary beiacrats issues regulations that have the force of law is detrimental.
Legality aside, I think there is a big political problem with Elon Musk and his gang of young engineers. They are tearing down a government agency without making a case, to Congress and to the American people, for doing it. That’s wrong.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim that USAID is a viper’s nest, a criminal organization, a tremendous fraud, and an organization run by radical lunatics. Sure, that’s hyperbole, but is there any evidence to give substance to their claims that USAID is such a mess that it needs to be shut down?
No. Elon Musk’s engineers did a quick audit of USAID and they released a list of especially problematic cases. The list is not impressive. It’s a ragbag of grants that are political in nature, but nothing even close to criminal or insane. The total is less than $4 million. As these are the most egregious cases, the other 99.99% of USAID’s funding is presumably even less of a problem.
Elon Musk can largely do what he wants in the companies he controls: X, SpaceX, Tesla. But he doesn’t control the federal government. He should not be doing what he is doing. He may get away with it, still, as he’s clever and amoral and knows how to work systems. But it’s still a shame and a disgrace.
The American people elected a President who agenda was crystal clear and has the power to set such steps in motion.
Congress’s approval is not required in this case. It’s Democracy.
The Constitution says Congress sets the budget, not the president. If the president could just decide how money gets spent, then the spending bills Congress passes would be meaningless. I voted for Donald Trump. I didn’t vote to give him the power to do whatever the h*ll he pleases. And I certainly didn’t vote for Elon Musk.
There’s nothing wrong with the concept of DOGE. The president should be looking for ways that money is wasted. If he finds money that is not being used as Congress intended, then he can cure that problem. He found that USAID was not using 0.01% of its budget for what Congress intended, and that should be corrected.
But the president can’t just decide that Congress has wasted money in its appropriations, and that he will close down the agency that was given that money so that money can be saved. That’s not within his power.
I just read today that USAID spent $286 mill in 2024 supporting “independent” media across the globe. Is this appropriate spending?
Maybe it’s appropriate spending, maybe not. My point is that USAID is an independent agency that is funded by Congress to do the work that Congress tells it to do. Donald Trump can appoint the head of that agency to replace Samantha Power, and he has some power over what that agency does. But he doesn’t have the right to shut the agency down and repurpose the funds that Congress appropriated to it.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk say on social media that USAID is a viper’s nest, a criminal organization, a tremendous fraud, and an organization run by radical lunatics, and then close it down in days giving no reason why the rush. Radical lunatics are at work here all right, but they are not at USAID.
Why should musk not be doing it? Is it just Musk? Or should no one do it?
Elon Musk should not be doing it because he doesn’t have the power to do it. He’s an advisor to the president, he cannot be delegated the power for him and his Musk Youth storm troopers to take executive action. DOGE was set up to prepare and deliver a report, not to run the government.
More broadly, though, the president himself doesn’t have the right to do what he did, to shut down an independent agency and repurpose its funding. Congress needs to authorize that, and Congress wasn’t even consulted.
But part of it is personal animus, as I’ve had about enough of Elon Musk. As a lawyer I was involved tangentially with the sale of Zip2 (a company Elon Musk and his brother Kimball founded) to Compaq in 1999, and got a taste of what a jerk he can be. He’s very talented, a genius in many ways, but in business — he has no business being in government.
Separation of powers is a farce and the judiciary has seized too much power. They have no authority to put an injunction and an executive agencies own administration. Nope, judges are unchecked and unelected politicians and are the last protectors of a corrupt elite that will not allow democratic rule.
Not just directed at yourself UR, but fascinated by how ignorant most comment leavers here on the nature of the US Constitution and the history behind it seem to be.
The importance of the separation of powers was probably the most crucial aspect of the Constitution pushed by the Founding Fathers and they’d experienced tyranny.
There’s a saying by someone I can’t remember about you can get 1000 people to agree with you if you play to their prejudice whilst only 1 ponders the position based on logic and rationality. Which side do you think you drift towards?
Apropos as always:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
“First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”
Those dedicated to the organizational bureaucracy need to be excised like the cancer they are. Is our American Kafkaesque nightmare’s end in sight? Let’s work harder to destroy their stranglehold on our institutions than their avaricious determination to asphyxiate our constitutional republic.
Now at least you endeavour to differentiate Chills. There will undoubtedly be some bureaucrats that need ‘leaning’. Bureaucracies always have the tendency towards self perpetuation, and that goes for private sector bureaucracies too when they get to a decent size. (Private sector loves monopoly position if it can achieve that)
But the vast majority of Federal employees are not these type of actors, and as they get affected the negative ‘ripple’ will grow and push back.
In other words, the scammers—the Regime—don’t want their crimes and scams exposed. All DOGE is doing is going through the books. The truth is already out. It’s out. No going back.
All regimes cling to power by their fingernails.
“No going back.” I just had the same epifany. The stunned establishment is witnessing, for the first time, what an enraged majority of the country wants to do to their regime. They all thought it was just so much puffery and they could continue on with the waste and corruption safe with the knowledge that their edifaces were impregnable. I cant help but think that, even if Trump’s onslaught is stimied, a profound lesson has been learned by the Deep State. But perhaps I am naive.
All regimes believe they will last forever. I don’t think regimes ever truly learn lessons. They hold on to power until they don’t—carrying on with their ideology, no matter how hated it is, right up until the moment their inner sanctums of power are breached.
Whatever this is, it’s a sacking. Is this the beginning of their collapse? I hope so.
For the first time in many years, the Deep State has felt the earth move beneath their feet. They don’t like it. Good. We need the bureaucracy, but not the bureaucracy we have. Their expensive, overbearing presence needs to be reduced. Or, in some cases, eliminated.
As an example, cutting the EPA down to size doesn’t mean we will all be poisoned in our beds. We got along without it quite well before it existed. The question is whether the good it has done is worth the money it has spent and the restriction on our proper liberties it has imposed.
“The question is whether the good it has done is worth the money it has spent and the restriction on our proper liberties it has imposed.”
You’re right that that is the right question. But who answers that question? The Constitution says Congress. Not the president, and sure as h*ll not Elon Musk.
DOGE should audit all of government and make public its recommendations on what to cut. DOGE should NOT be making those cuts itself.
I approve — in theory. On the ground, recommendations are a dime a dozen — and worth every penny. As far back as the Hoover Commission (Hoover was named by Truman, a level of bipartisanship now alas, vanished) experts identified parts of the bureaucracy that needed trimming. The bureaucracy ignored them. They can’t ignore DOGE and Musk. The misbehavior, waste and usurpation of power is being dragged into the daylight, and the public is taking notice. The pruning being done will be ragged, with some useful bits being lopped off and some offensive bits left alone, but that’s the way of democracy.
Clearly the Courts are applying a brake of sorts, for the time being at least. This may allow the reality of what is being done to catch up with the propaganda. The ‘move fast and break things’ may be a strategy with some success in Silicon valley but it remains to be seen what happens when the consequences of this approach to Govt agencies starts to fully register.
For example, when real people who’ve done a decent job find themselves unemployed, whether they voted for Trump or not, and their family and community begin to see that. Or practising Christians who may have supported the overturn of Roe vs Wade but also happened to work in the Aid industry with a genuine vocation to help others return home unemployed shocked that the World’s richest man can clobber some of the poorest with such ease and with personal consequences for them as an Aid worker too.
You see it’s one thing to paint propaganda about faceless bureaucrats, it’s another when it turns out to be the guy who did an important job for your community who you know. It then juxtaposes with what you start to hear about Trump’s prioritisation of Billionaire tax cuts whilst sniping everywhere for cuts to services you and your family might actually occasionally need. Gradually it dawns. It’s a racket.
And as the reality catches up public opinion will help also form Court opinion on the limits of Executive power.
Folks forget the election was won with a smaller margin than even Hilary Clinton got in the popular vote and the third lowest ever victory margin. This is not a Nation that voted to change the Constitution and certainly not a nation that seeks after 250 years to go back to a form of Monarchy.
The most likely aspect is not the reform of the administrative state to benefit the population, but the looting of the state to benefit Trump, Musk and Thiel. There will be some trickle-down crumbs.