Why Should We Care if the Trump Administration, and Musk’s DOGE, Are Acting Unconstitutionally?

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time on the details of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, DOGE’s incursion into it and the manifold dangers it poses. Today I want to step back and reemphasize the bigger picture that I started with exactly three weeks ago in my January 31st piece “Everything About the Trump Administration’s Impoundment Putsch You Were Too Afraid to Ask”.

Recognizing that the current impoundment crisis comes from the same right wing think tanks which built the modern right wing legal movement and successfully led the Supreme Court to embrace their agenda, we can see better how this all fits together. Impoundment is meant to be the final demolition of the administrative state that the Supreme Court has been building up to. Before their job was to weaken it themselves. Now the Supreme Court’s job is to avoid confronting the constitutional crisis before us and let executive power take the reins, permanently demoting the previously co-equal branches. Expanding the President’s executive power, embracing unitary executive theory, striking down laws passed by congress: it was all in service of eliminating administrative agencies, especially “independent” administrative agencies and shrinking Congress’s ability to govern (even if, at times, it was in the name of Congress governing more). Now the baton has been passed in service of limiting the rights of individuals, especially minorities and greatly enhancing centralized, unaccountable power.

We should care about the unconstitutionality of the Trump administration’s, and Elon Musk’s DOGE, because it is furthering the centralization and expansion of unaccountable power in the service of abrogating more of our rights. Our right to clean air and water. Our right to the already too-limited protections against discrimination. Our already too-weak right to privacy. Our right not to be scammed and looted from. Our workplace protections and our right not to die from the mishandling of the nuclear stockpile because of inept, dangerous and illegal mass firings. Our already weak right to an education. Most of all, our right to rebuild after the second Trump administration has smashed up so many of the tools of rebuilding. Ultimately, our right to make decisions about our own lives without being essentially micromanaged by venal billionaires. Hell, our right to have a truly different government after “King Trump”.