From the FT editorial board:
In a 4am social media post last week, Elon Musk called his project to hack back the US federal bureaucracy the “revolution of the people”. What the world’s richest man is attempting looks, in reality, less like a popular uprising than a power grab by the executive branch, backed by President Donald Trump. Dismantling federal agencies, freezing funding and pushing staff to resign goes far beyond a mere restructuring. It aims to shift the constitutional separation and balance of powers.
The Department of Government Efficiency that Musk heads is not a government agency established by Congress but an opaque body created by executive order. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has argued it has no authority to make spending decisions or shut down programmes — let alone entire agencies.
As well as vandalising the machinery of government, however, this supposed efficiency drive appears to be being used as cover to bolster the power of the executive branch to drive through its priorities and neuter opposition. The Musk team’s tactics in government departments resemble his takeover of Twitter, where he fired 80 per cent of the workforce, sweeping away potential critics and opponents — and many who really understood how the organisation worked.
The Doge team’s efforts to take control of payment systems dovetail, too, with the administration’s attempt to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars of federal grants and loans, later rescinded after it was temporarily halted by a judge. Both look like a bid to challenge a 1974 law that makes it illegal for the president to refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated — tilting the balance of power from the legislative to the executive branch.
With Congress largely supine, it is falling to the courts to defend the constitutional order.
[S]acrificing the rule of law to government efficiency is a good way to end up with neither.
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