Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,
In the last few days, Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) has effectively put an end to USAID, gelded the General Services Administration (GSA) tech division, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury, and fired corrupt people in the FBI – and that’s just the short list.
With the war on USAID, GSA, OPM, and the Treasury alone, DOGE is saving taxpayers at a rate of one billion per day. All of this has driven the Democrats into a frenzy as they insist that an elected president managing the government is a coup. Unfortunately for them (but not for us), they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
President Kennedy founded USAID via Executive Order 10973 in November 1961: “Administration of Foreign Assistance and Related Functions.” It was meant to be a permanent clearing house that would work with the State Department to distribute money intended to help advance technology and financial competence in low-income countries. It reflected the fact that, in 1961, the U.S. was still the last country standing after WWII. The vision was to benefit America by fortifying poor countries against Soviet depredation.
Image by Grok.
USAID has strayed far from that mandate. The Daily Mail assembled a helpful list of examples of USAID’s hard-left blank check policy. This list includes:
-
$30 million to study HIV in Africa among sex workers and so-called “transgender” people.
-
$38 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other Chinese research labs.
-
$1.5 million to an LGBTQ+ group in Serbia.
-
$2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam, with only one battery station built.
-
Money for a “trans” care clinic in Vietnam.
-
$25,000 for a “trans” opera in Colombia
-
$32,000 for “trans” comic books in Peru.
-
$500,000 to expand atheism in Nepal.
The Clinton Foundation was also a huge USAID winner:
None of this advanced US interests. All this money—your money—was for leftist social engineering and, seemingly, political money laundering. Elon Musk is right that it needs to go.
Things weren’t any better with money going to GSA, where its technology arm, in Luke Rosiak’s words, was “a far-left agency that viciously subverted Trump during his first term.” The GSA had a government-wide computer office—“@18F”—that still has a “trans flag” as its logo. It aggressively enforced extreme DEI policies, including illegally excluding people from activities by race or sex. (Read Roziak’s thread for more examples of GSA tech’s leftist depredations.)
Elon Musk revealed that the Treasury Department was cutting checks to terrorist organizations and known fraudsters:
And, of course, Trump fired all the FBI agents involved in the war against those of Trump’s supporters who showed up at the Capitol on January 6. The Acting FBI Director fought back, which leads to the point of this article: It’s almost certain that none of these people has a legal leg to stand on, whether it comes to the way Trump has stopped the money flow or the firings.
First, Trump’s refusal to fund corrupt agencies: Since 1801, under the aegis of Thomas Jefferson, presidents have had a power known as impoundment. This means the president gets to decide how to spend—or not spend—money that Congress has allocated.
In other words, the generation that ratified the Constitution believed that this was an appropriate exercise of executive power. However, in 1974, in yet another piece of Watergate fallout, Congress enacted the “Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974,” which says that the president must submit to Congress his plans not to spend money.
Given the history of impoundment (the ratifying generation approved of it), it’s highly unlikely that this act is constitutional. The fact that no president has yet challenged it doesn’t change this reality. Additionally, because Trump has a majority in Congress, if he were to submit his impoundment plan, the greater likelihood is that it would give him a pass. (RINOs would have a hard time explaining to voters why they want America to pay for “trans” comic books in Peru.)
Second, Trump’s ability to fire employees: Here’s a slimmed-down version of the history of presidential power in this area.
In 1789, the First Congress debated whether the Constitution gives the president the unilateral power to remove Executive Branch officers. Ultimately, Congress simply said that when the president fires someone (a tacit acknowledgment that he has that unilateral power), a lower-level employee must take custody of records until a new officer is appointed.
That debate has led the Supreme Court to hold several times that Congress has no direct role in firing officials. (See, e.g., Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714, 723 (1986); Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 146 (1926); Parsons v. United States, 167 U.S. 324, 338–43 (1897).)
There was a fight over this power when Andrew Johnson attempted to fire an Executive Branch officer whom Lincoln had appointed, violating the Tenure of Office Act, and leading to Johnson’s impeachment. However, the Senate did not convict Johnson, and by 1887, Congress repealed any requirement that the Senate approve firings.
When the 19th century ended, the president’s unilateral power to fire officers was unquestioned. This makes sense because if the Founders had wanted to extend the “advice and consent” power to firings, they could have done so. This standard continued through the 1920s.
Things changed in the 1930s when an activist Supreme Court created a new standard, which has affected (or infected) the government to this day: It held that if Congress designates an agency as “independent,” Congress, not the president, has the power over dismissal, with the president as its agent. This was the go-ahead to create a fourth branch of government that is neither legislative, executive, nor judicial, although, as we’ve repeatedly seen, these “independent” agencies all claim those powers.
The big issue of our day is whether these “independent” agencies are constitutional—I say they’re not because they are not one of the three branches of government established under the Constitution. Thankfully, the Supreme Court has, of late, been pulling back from the 1930s template.
Here’s another legal concept: “The greater includes the lesser.”
In this case, it means that if the president has the power to fire officials, he has the power to fire lesser employees working under those officials.
And one last legal concept: President Trump has appointed DOGE and Elon Musk to act as his agents when it comes to reasserting executive control over government agencies.
Agents acting within the scope of their assigned agency have the same authority as the principal.
I’m confident that President Trump is acting entirely within the authority the Founding Fathers and ratifiers of our Constitution intended him to have. However, we know that these issues will end up before the Court and, perhaps, before Congress.
I’m hopeful that, as President Trump and DOGE expose an escalating amount of government fraud, abuse, and waste, despite the escalating Democrat pushback, Congress and the Courts will understand that they will not have the American people at their backs if they strike down his legitimate use of constitutional power. Or, as this tweet thread says, nobody is going to be very sympathetic to Democrat lamentations and threats:
