The DOGE Master speaks:
There is a lot to be said about this clip and Musk’s appearance in the Oval Office (not the least of which is that I have never seen anyone hold court with the press like this in the Oval except for the President, but that is another discussion).
Musk is claiming that because Trump campaigned on reform/cutting waste that that means the way that DOGE is behaving has full democratic authority behind it.
No.
Full stop.
Just because a presidential candidate campaigns on something and then wins does not mean that the now-elected president can do whatever they want to pursue a given goal. No, it means that the president can attempt to work, within the system, to accomplish the promised goals.
By the simplistic logic that Musk provides, Trump should just declare prices lower, after all, he campaigned on that, too.
To be more specific, the power to adjust the budget and reorganize the federal government is a congressional power. If Musk and his buddies were just assessing the federal government and providing recommendations that the administration could then provide to Congress, that would be acceptable. Running around from agency to agency and recklessly combing through data and proclaiming you have found massive fraud and waste is not acceptable. Moreover, none of it actually fixes anything (quite the opposite) and it isn’t like it all clear how any of this actually saves real money.
Although, how could I doubt this kind of math?
If you listen to the whole thing, he is promising to cut the deficit in half, get GDP growth up to as high as 5%, lower interest rates (including, somehow, on existing mortgages), and get inflation down.
Imagine there’s no inflation. It’s easy if you try!
This is utter nonsense. And yet, a lot of people are going to eat it up. It is the classic, “fraud and waste” nonsense on steroids ketamine.
There are a lot of folks in the administration making the “this is what people voted for” assertions I keep hearing from the administration (it’s not just Musk). For example, here’s the new OMB Director making similar claims during his confirmation hearings.
Trump has argued that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, and so has his nominee for budget director, Russell Vought, who had the same job at the end of the president’s first term. Vought also helped write Project 2025, the conservative-governing blueprint that attracted so many attacks from Democrats that Trump disavowed it during the campaign.
In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Vought repeatedly refused to commit to abiding by the impoundment act even as he acknowledged that it is “the law of the land.” “For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less,” he told senators at his first hearing. During his second appearance, when Van Hollen asked him whether he would comply with the law, Vought did not answer directly. “Senator, the president ran against the Impoundment Control Act,” he replied.
Here’s the deal: “running against” a piece of legislation means that once in office you can be expected to try and get the legislation changed. You know, like when you have control of both chambers of Congress you make a legislative proposal.
The notion that because you “ran against” something doesn’t mean that you, therefore, can do what you want in regards to that something once you win.
As the old cliche goes, the president proposes and Congress disposes.
I say all of this fully recognizing that Congress is not as functional as I would like it to be, but by the same token, it does still function. The previous president was able to get significant legislation passed, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act when his party controlled Congress.
And yes, the Trump administration is purposefully picking a fight in the hopes that the Supreme Court will overturn the Impoundment Control Act. I am not disputing its ability to pick said fight. I do question the way they are doing it. They are clearly also banking that a lot of this DOGE nonsense will be endorsed by the Supreme Court.
But I am underscoring that their theory of government is that Trump can do whatever he wants because he won the election.
There are any number of words for that and “democratic” ain’t one of them.
One of the ironies (to me, anyway), is that a lot of people who like to shout about how we are a republic, and not a democracy (people like Senator Lee of Utah and the Heritage Foundation itself) are now using the notion that a plurality elected Trump, so that means he can pretty much do what he wants, including ignoring the Congress and the courts. These people who like to deploy that phrase often say it is because they don’t want a simplistic majority-vote system to prevail, yet this is exactly what they are currently arguing for, and actively supporting: one vote, the president wins, and can do whatever he wants.
But, again, that is not democratic governance nor it is the way the US Constitution functions.
Lee comes to mind for various reasons, to include this tweet from 2020:
We are currently witnessing the accumulation of power in the hands of the few. And we are seeing clear challenges, if not direct violations, of the constitutional order.
(BTW: all of what I am seeing from people like Lee is a confirmation that what they mean when they say the US is a republic, not a democracy is that what they really mean is not some deep theoretical notion about governance, but rather that they don’t want a truly representative democracy, but that they really want some form of oligarchy where the right kind of people get to make decisions).
