DOGE Can’t Slash Government Without Congress
“It’s a joke,” a “waste of time“: That was the Democratic line on the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) just months ago. But ever since Elon Musk and his “baby-faced assassins” stormed the bureaucracy—mass-firing employees, zeroing out budgets, and tossing agencies “into the woodchipper“—the tune has changed. Now, DOGE is “an agent of chaos without limitation,” per a lawsuit from Democratic state attorneys general. Worse, says Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), they’re “seizing the tools they need for a coup.”
Even some self-described libertarians are not at all amused by the Musketeers’ hijinks. I’m at a loss: How are they not enjoying this? The whole thing plays like it was scripted by Ayn Rand, if Rand had a sense of humor.
Even so, I’m hoping DOGE provides something beyond entertainment value—I’d like it to work. But it won’t, so long as the DOGEnauts believe they can cut trillions from the federal budget with executive action alone. To get the job done, DOGE needs Congress.
So far, DOGE has stuck to the go-it-alone strategy Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy outlined in The Wall Street Journal after the election: “driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” But that’s not how any of this works. Neither the president nor his proxies can summarily zero out agencies and departments for which Congress has provided statutory authority and funding. Even the MAGA-friendly Heritage Foundation acknowledged as much in a 2017 legal memorandum: “The power to enact, amend, or abolish these executive departments and agencies and their functions belongs to Congress.” The DOGE team is finding that out the hard way, as their agency-killing plans get hung up in federal court.
President Donald Trump’s team thinks they’ve found a work-around—an ambitious constitutional theory that lets the president nullify congressional appropriations he doesn’t like. The last president to try that was Richard Nixon, and he didn’t get very far. In his second term, when Nixon adopted an impoundment-on-steroids strategy, withholding billions in appropriated funds, he got slapped down, first by the courts, then by Congress. In 1974, Congress shut the door to future abuses by passing the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to get congressional approval before rescinding appropriations.
Key Trump officials, like Offi
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