Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.
That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.
That’s just how litigation works. If the issue comes down to the payment of money, courts assume that it can be sorted out eventually by ordering money to be paid or returned. The government can destroy your business with an illegal regulation, and they don’t have to ask courts for permission first. I’m such cases, you probably won’t even get money back from the government. It would be bizarre to impose a higher standard of oversight for the government to restructure its own operations than for the government to regulate private conduct.
The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.
That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.
Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.
>That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not [an American], and explain it in simple terms.
Not only is he an American, but also he routinely makes arguments to American Federal judges very similar to the argument he is making here or at least he is a colleague and coworker of people who do.
A CEO can absolutely not spend the company's money as it was his own. That would be a breach of trust or embezzlement and outright criminal. You can bound by budget and fidicuary duty, and answer to the owners or their board of directors. People regularly get jail time for this type of crime.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
Not at all. The founders were focused on having a vigorous executive who could “just do things.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The system they created is not based on the premise of cautious bureaucracy. It was based on having frequent elections that would empower a vigorous president and political appointees to carry out what they had campaigned on.
The founders were men of action. They would be horrified by how our government today is run by lawyers through APA litigation. The HR-ification of the American government is a mid-20th century invention.
APA == the Administrative Procedure Act, enacted by Congress in 1946.
An unreliable source writes, "litigants frequently use the Administrative Procedure Act to argue that an agency acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, failed to follow required notice-and-comment procedures, or exceeded its statutory authority."
The common presumption that when the electorate expresses their will to change things, the elected will still not be able to change anything due to entrenched bureaucracy, and this is good, is one of the reasons Trump won twice.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
So, per your interpretation, the president can just ignore any law created by Congress by simply allocating zero funds to any agency carrying out the law?
USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.
So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
That's how it should be. But they counted on the courts being slower to catch up with stuff than that they could destroy it and by and large that proved to be correct. The checks and balances in the USA are not prepared to deal with people at this level of power that are as malicious as this. The founders more or less left that as an exercise for the future to figure out and may have presaged such a thing happening in some of their writings.
> Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
Yes, but the paperwork that decides who is the President or his appointee’s lawful agent is different than the civil service paperwork for employment. Lewin was appointed as an SGE. This article is about the HR details of his internal transfer into USAID. But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
> If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
Yes. But if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide and hadn’t done all his paperwork yet, would that be illegal? And also, doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights. Very different from a doing an internal reorganization within a department. If a CEO pulls in someone from one department to clean house in another department, how much HR paperwork do you really need?
I think my understanding of the paperwork and authority has grown, and I can agree with some of what you're saying, but I think there's still a story here.
> But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
So the delegated authority from Rubio is what made it legal for him to shut things down? He wasn't appointed and delegated until March 18th. He started there on January 28th. Sometime around January 30th he participated in ordering the acting administrator to shut down communications systems and terminate top officials. He was working there for 7 weeks as a non-employee, non-appointee, non-delegate, forcing the hand of the administrator who is supposed to be Senate-confirmed.
Even if you fall back on his detailing from GSA, it's dated Feb 14th and is "contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of... pre-employment screening required by USAID" -- the screening he did not complete.
Do you consider shutting down the agency a special activity, distinct from working within it at any other time? It seems a strange qualification to put on. Are the requirements for staffing looser if the official intends to close the agency?
> if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide
Then he'd still be an authorized police officer, I presume. You argued based on explicitly delegated authority from the USAID administrator or cabinet official, not that being a GSA employee meant he could go to any agency without further authority. Per above, he wasn't immediately given the delegated authority, and even his detailing seems on shaky grounds.
> doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights
Well, yes, but it's also explicitly in the law that there are procedures to authorize a search, same as the law says there are procedures to change staff, spend or not spend funds, or shut down an agency. If anything, the thousands of fired USAID employees and tens of thousands of USAID beneficiaries had their individual rights impinged by the "internal reorganization" (but I admit, probably not Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.)
Why do 2/3 of the law professors quoted say he should have been Senate-confirmed? Maybe they're biased or were fed the story and reacted without much research. It's at least a flaw of the article that it doesn't clearly explain why a COO would need to be confirmed. Maybe the professors consider Rubio's delegation to be making Lewin the de facto administrator without the required confirmation.
Anyway, he probably became fully authorized on March 18th. I don't know if he actually succeeded at anything notable before then, but he was trying to shut things down and coerce the legal administrator while, at best, a provisional detailee. I think that should be as disturbingly sloppy as sending out a police officer with inadequate legal certification on file, or performing a search with only an unrecorded verbal assent from a judge. In some hand-wavy way, any of these cases are "authorized" (e.g. I presume Rubio or Trump would have approved of anything he did), but we should expect a stricter documented standard in full compliance with best-practice procedures. For 7 weeks he was below even your bar of "delegated authority from the cabinet official", let alone some experts' claims that he should have been confirmed.
P.S. I think rayiner doesn't oppose Jack Smith's appointment, but I assume anyone else defending this also supports Smith's appointment and opposes the court meddling with it... if a president doesn't need anyone's permission to staff his branch however he likes.
I don't understand the outrage about filling out a form. It's not an argument from any principle. That the president could not exercise his will because someone down the chain didn't fill out a form that otherwise serves no real purpose and would be read by no one of import sounds like a Kafkaesque nightmare.
The Administrator of USAID is a presidentially appointed and senate confirmed position. Under the Vacancies Reform Act the President can appoint another Senate confirmed official from anywhere else in the government to fill that spot for up to 210 days. Trump appointed Rubio to that role.
An acting administrator or agency head can then generally “detail” an employee from anywhere else in the government to serve as a deputy in a temporary basis, which Rubio did here. Agency heads generally have broad discretion to hire their deputies.
There was a recession bill passed in 2025 July 2025 for already appropriated monies.
Moreover, the impoundment rules don’t require congress to act first before the president acts. They require the money to be spent, but if the budgetary authority is provided over a year it’s hard to say when the president must spend that money within the year. (Unless there’s specific requirements in the statute.)
It's absurd to argue the executive can intentionally delay and shuffle money earmarked specifically for certain purposes, like USAID. Why not just give the executive all power over the Treasury? Why have Congress at all?
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
But again DOGE acted before that was in place. All I’m saying is I expect a future DOJ to find legal grounds for going ofter those involved for exceeding their authority.
What makes you think the impoundment process requires the executive to wait until Congress acts? Impoundment is a rule that says “you have to spend this money.” The appropriations bills give budget authority over a year or multiple years. Why can’t the executive act first then ask congress to rescind money he isn’t going to spend for the rest of the year?
I think appointing people who absolutely should not be doing the jobs they are appointed to is a way of sidestepping all law. They want to destroy all government and what better way to do it than through sheer incompetence with a layer of plausible deniability.
I guess your point of view makes sense if you think of “government” as some self-sustaining organism where voting is supposed to nudge the ship but can’t steer it. Fortunately, that isn’t the government the founders created.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
This article isn't about that, though? USAID was never designated as an independent agency. But it was a statutory agency, which means that the President was required to run it according to its statutory structure.
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
> Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws
The impoundment control act specifically provides for Congress to resend previously appropriate spending if the president doesn’t want to spend it. nothing in the empowerment control act that clearly prevents the president from freezing spending for a short period within a single given budget year before asking Congress to resend particular appropriations.
The USAID budget in 2024 was almost $35 billion annually. If you search the budget bill for amounts “apportioned to” USAID, you will not find $35 billion of annual budget authority specifically to USAID. Much of USAID’s funding is appropriated to the President and apportioned to State. State has broad powers to transfer the funds: https://uscode.house.gov/us/usc/119-134/t22/s2675/
There is a complex web of statues and regulations that applies to the state department specifically. There is a reason these lawsuits have not gone anywhere.
It is pretty clear what the goal was here: to do an end run around spending money that was already appropriately earmarked. You can twist and turn all you want but that's what it was and no amount of seeking justification after the fact is going to change that.
The problem is that if you see everything through the twin lenses of paper and power that you risk losing your humanity. USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close. Seeing it shut down killed people, pure and simple, and whether that may have not been the goal (it may well have been the goal, I do not know) the outcome is the same.
Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering makes for an interesting test in character, morals and ultimately in actual justice.
And therein lies the reason why these lawsuits have not gone anywhere. But nobody's fooled. Well, ok, maybe you are.
> USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close.
There was a time when it did that, yes. But it began as a State Department front to interfere in the politics of third world countries and ultimately returned to such activities. There's a reason Mexico's President, who hates Trump, supported shutting it down: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu... ("During a press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for shutting down USAID, criticizing the agency's role in funding organizations she described as working against Mexican interests.").
I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
> Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering
I've been on HN since the Obama administration, and you won't find a single post from me defending federal bureaucratic privilege under any administration. I simply do not believe that the bureaucracy is a branch of government in and of itself. The federal bureaucracy is not in our constitution--it is a European import from admirers of the Prussian bureaucracy: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-german-stamp-on-wilsons-a....
> I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
Is there anything that you won't twist to justify your hero's actions?
Elections certainly have consequences, and I wish acting outside constitutional scope had consequences, too. (maybe this specific issue is within scope or there is a reasonable question about it, but so many other issues seem unreasonably out of scope, IMHO)
i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
49.8% of people voted for "this". After he disavowed Project 2025 which was a bit of a boogeyman prospect.
But, turns out, yes, he was Mr 2025. He also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs (big promises of reproductive care access for example), or anything else. He elected himself to ally with dictators and foreign powers, to rip up and destroy the government.
We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this. And I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress, to use the FCC for jawboning, to use the DOJ as a puppet, to go after non-violent student protestors, to... It just goes on and on.
The people who did vote for this have been lied to by the Republican controlled media. The powell memorandum is real, and these people have been sold lies. It's almost a miracle that the truth is just so in the face of the lies that the propaganda lies sold to tear down and destroy the USA are going to be so evidently false that even huge swarths of red America won't be able to keep their head in the sand and slumber through another round of billionaire insurrection with the same ease they've supported it for for decades.
We don't get to just tear everything down because of one election.
GOP voters will somehow find the sex trafficking cabal in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor and Obama's illuminati connections but when asked to connect Trump to P2025 it's, "he said he hasn't read it, case closed."
> also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs
If only the 2020 money printer or the ACA "repeal and replace" that never happened could have warned us of this.
> ally with dictators and foreign powers
Kim, Putin, MBS... all his best friends/financiers before 2024.
> We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this.
They either voted for this or they can't be bothered to use recent memory to inform their voting decisions.
> I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress...
For some, he's exactly the president to land these questions in front of the Supreme Court, whose majority loves unitary executive and hates stare decisis. For others, he's allowed to try without consequence because SCOTUS declared presidential actions to have absolute immunity.
That's the thing about liars - they lie. I don't think you get to claim that voting for a liar isn't voting for a bunch of lies or that it's only voting for the things he lied and said he supported. It was well known he was a liar, and anyone who believed he wasn't in 2024 was deluding themselves.
I don’t want any of this to slide. I weep for the institutions that were destroyed, the faith in those institutions and our standing on the global stage. The apathy of voters, failures of Biden to step aside or the DNC to oust him in a timely manner and the alienation of the working class by the party that cares for them are all incredible failures. I dedicated thousands and thousands of dollars to attempt to stop DJTs reelection. “Elections have consequences” isn’t defeatest-it is a call to arms that people need to engage more in the election process.
The UK's Brexit fuck-up was somewhat different in that the referendum didn't have clear rules or objectives. No minimum majority was specified (e.g. referendum will often specify that there has to be >5% majority) and the "Brexit" was not at all specified which meant years of arguments about "soft" or "hard" Brexit.
I voted Remain, and it's not entirely fair to say that all pro-Brexiters were racist, but the racists did certainly vote that way.
But that is exactly what happened. He ran on deportations, ending the war in Ukraine, and Project 2025. He explicitly said he was going to do as much as possible through executive action. SCOTUS has already shown its deference to him.
And the American people elected Trump and gave him both houses. There is very, little that can be done until his term is up. Norms mean nothing when you re-elect the guy famous for creating the world of alternative facts.
I worked as a contractor for USAID. A lot of the people that worked there were spies. They shut it down because they weren't 'their' spies. Some people voted in the president to dismantle the deep state, and he did, but he just replaced them with the deeper state who probably eat children.
But he was elected, which qualifies him. The voters voted for this sort of thing. Not in the exact details, but that's why it's a representative democracy instead of a direct one.
The fact that it was called a "Department" when it wasn't even technically a department makes me think Congress didn't authorize anything, and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
The country is run by literal 90-year-olds deferring to whoever is against the other party.
> ... and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
^^^ This right here. In nearly every other job, you refuse to do your job (or worse yet, do the opposite of your job while "on the clock" at work), you're pretty much instantly fired, and sometimes (depending on the severity of your violation) you're even prosecuted.
Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.
If he actually gives up power in 2029 I'm pretty sure he'll do a mass pardon. But since presidents aren't supposed to pardon themselves I wouldn't be surprised if it can be struck down.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, they could simply decide that those things that trump did weren't legal including his pardons. Sure, there will be a lot of pushback but if nothing is done against this kind of behavior you can set your watch for the next installment of fascism light.
I'd like to see them all rounded up and put in prison indefinitely. Denied bail and left there while their crimes are documented. Everybody connected to DOGE should be in prison, all the way up to Elon.
There's something about the trick of abusing a process set up to hire temporary staff quickly for overseas disasters and pandemics to take over and destroy a government department you don't like that feels LLM-like to me.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.
Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.
Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
It will be interesting to see whether in the next Admin/Congress , if Democrat, will investigate and declare these actions unlawful (done without Congressional approval) and whether a new DOJ will investigate the individuals like this DOGE dude as having broken the law for operating outside their authority because the proper procedures weren’t followed. It’s going to be interesting to see whether/who winds up in jail.
Love to see HN political bot comment graph like if and when there was a surge of them over time (US elections or other countries elections). Like did the Ukraine blowing up Yandex's data center(s) have any effect?
Actively stopping something that prevented a death is causing a death. If you cut the brakes on somebody's car, you caused a death by interfering with its prevention.
This type of strategy is almost the only way to get rid of these kinds of agencies. You'd end up with a million raodblocks being tossed up if you tried it any other way.
Right, because there shouldn't be any roadblocks when you're taking an action that has a high probability of resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying.
DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency. Also focusing on where majority of spending occurs where we could get biggest bang for the improved efficiency. After this good luck selling someone on another round of efficiency improvements.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
There is a book about DOGE, "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State" by Michael Lewis. In a recent interview he said, that after researching DOGE and its actions he believes something similar what you said, that DOGE was only a smoke screen or distraction for a larger transfer of executive power.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
> But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules.
It's not even established that he has the power. The fact that they do something doesn't mean they have that power.
And given that, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore all other rules.
> You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no?
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.
That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.
That’s just how litigation works. If the issue comes down to the payment of money, courts assume that it can be sorted out eventually by ordering money to be paid or returned. The government can destroy your business with an illegal regulation, and they don’t have to ask courts for permission first. I’m such cases, you probably won’t even get money back from the government. It would be bizarre to impose a higher standard of oversight for the government to restructure its own operations than for the government to regulate private conduct.
The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.
That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.
Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.
> Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
It's like byzantine faults, no system can protect you if you don't have some minimum of correctly functioning legislators, judges, and executives.
>That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not [an American], and explain it in simple terms.
Not only is he an American, but also he routinely makes arguments to American Federal judges very similar to the argument he is making here or at least he is a colleague and coworker of people who do.
A CEO can absolutely not spend the company's money as it was his own. That would be a breach of trust or embezzlement and outright criminal. You can bound by budget and fidicuary duty, and answer to the owners or their board of directors. People regularly get jail time for this type of crime.
> “The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO.”
Given the Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United, Loper Bright, and Hobby Lobby I find this notion obscene.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
Not at all. The founders were focused on having a vigorous executive who could “just do things.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The system they created is not based on the premise of cautious bureaucracy. It was based on having frequent elections that would empower a vigorous president and political appointees to carry out what they had campaigned on.
The founders were men of action. They would be horrified by how our government today is run by lawyers through APA litigation. The HR-ification of the American government is a mid-20th century invention.
APA == the Administrative Procedure Act, enacted by Congress in 1946.
An unreliable source writes, "litigants frequently use the Administrative Procedure Act to argue that an agency acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, failed to follow required notice-and-comment procedures, or exceeded its statutory authority."
> They would be horrified by how our government today
100%, just not in the direction you think. They would be apalled at Trump's blatant, in your face corruption all while the MAGA base cheers him on.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
I do not believe this is true historically
A common problem in systems where two branches of government have equal claim to popular mandate.
The common presumption that when the electorate expresses their will to change things, the elected will still not be able to change anything due to entrenched bureaucracy, and this is good, is one of the reasons Trump won twice.
Are you calling congress "HR"? Congress created USAID, and did not approve it being destroyed.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
So, per your interpretation, the president can just ignore any law created by Congress by simply allocating zero funds to any agency carrying out the law?
USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.
So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
That's how it should be. But they counted on the courts being slower to catch up with stuff than that they could destroy it and by and large that proved to be correct. The checks and balances in the USA are not prepared to deal with people at this level of power that are as malicious as this. The founders more or less left that as an exercise for the future to figure out and may have presaged such a thing happening in some of their writings.
> Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
Yes, but the paperwork that decides who is the President or his appointee’s lawful agent is different than the civil service paperwork for employment. Lewin was appointed as an SGE. This article is about the HR details of his internal transfer into USAID. But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
> If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
Yes. But if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide and hadn’t done all his paperwork yet, would that be illegal? And also, doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights. Very different from a doing an internal reorganization within a department. If a CEO pulls in someone from one department to clean house in another department, how much HR paperwork do you really need?
I think my understanding of the paperwork and authority has grown, and I can agree with some of what you're saying, but I think there's still a story here.
> But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
So the delegated authority from Rubio is what made it legal for him to shut things down? He wasn't appointed and delegated until March 18th. He started there on January 28th. Sometime around January 30th he participated in ordering the acting administrator to shut down communications systems and terminate top officials. He was working there for 7 weeks as a non-employee, non-appointee, non-delegate, forcing the hand of the administrator who is supposed to be Senate-confirmed.
Even if you fall back on his detailing from GSA, it's dated Feb 14th and is "contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of... pre-employment screening required by USAID" -- the screening he did not complete.
Do you consider shutting down the agency a special activity, distinct from working within it at any other time? It seems a strange qualification to put on. Are the requirements for staffing looser if the official intends to close the agency?
> if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide
Then he'd still be an authorized police officer, I presume. You argued based on explicitly delegated authority from the USAID administrator or cabinet official, not that being a GSA employee meant he could go to any agency without further authority. Per above, he wasn't immediately given the delegated authority, and even his detailing seems on shaky grounds.
> doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights
Well, yes, but it's also explicitly in the law that there are procedures to authorize a search, same as the law says there are procedures to change staff, spend or not spend funds, or shut down an agency. If anything, the thousands of fired USAID employees and tens of thousands of USAID beneficiaries had their individual rights impinged by the "internal reorganization" (but I admit, probably not Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.)
Why do 2/3 of the law professors quoted say he should have been Senate-confirmed? Maybe they're biased or were fed the story and reacted without much research. It's at least a flaw of the article that it doesn't clearly explain why a COO would need to be confirmed. Maybe the professors consider Rubio's delegation to be making Lewin the de facto administrator without the required confirmation.
Anyway, he probably became fully authorized on March 18th. I don't know if he actually succeeded at anything notable before then, but he was trying to shut things down and coerce the legal administrator while, at best, a provisional detailee. I think that should be as disturbingly sloppy as sending out a police officer with inadequate legal certification on file, or performing a search with only an unrecorded verbal assent from a judge. In some hand-wavy way, any of these cases are "authorized" (e.g. I presume Rubio or Trump would have approved of anything he did), but we should expect a stricter documented standard in full compliance with best-practice procedures. For 7 weeks he was below even your bar of "delegated authority from the cabinet official", let alone some experts' claims that he should have been confirmed.
P.S. I think rayiner doesn't oppose Jack Smith's appointment, but I assume anyone else defending this also supports Smith's appointment and opposes the court meddling with it... if a president doesn't need anyone's permission to staff his branch however he likes.
I don't understand the outrage about filling out a form. It's not an argument from any principle. That the president could not exercise his will because someone down the chain didn't fill out a form that otherwise serves no real purpose and would be read by no one of import sounds like a Kafkaesque nightmare.
So there's not like statutory rules governing the mechanism by which the President makes that guy his avatar (not Rubio, the guy in the article)?
If he ordered a dog to dismantle USAID, would the ineffectiveness of that simply be due to the dog being incompetent and not be legally challengeable?
The Administrator of USAID is a presidentially appointed and senate confirmed position. Under the Vacancies Reform Act the President can appoint another Senate confirmed official from anywhere else in the government to fill that spot for up to 210 days. Trump appointed Rubio to that role.
An acting administrator or agency head can then generally “detail” an employee from anywhere else in the government to serve as a deputy in a temporary basis, which Rubio did here. Agency heads generally have broad discretion to hire their deputies.
Only Congress had the power. But Congress didn’t call the Executive branch on it, so … here we are.
That’s not quite accurate. While Congress didn’t abolish USAID, it did enact appropriations bills that transferred the funding to the State Department. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779
USAID still exists on paper. But under the current appropriations bills, the funding is allocated to the State Department.
That bill was never passed into law.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...
It was incorporated into the consolidated 2026 appropriations bill that was enacted: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr4779
Most DOGE activity was in 2025, no?
There was a recession bill passed in 2025 July 2025 for already appropriated monies.
Moreover, the impoundment rules don’t require congress to act first before the president acts. They require the money to be spent, but if the budgetary authority is provided over a year it’s hard to say when the president must spend that money within the year. (Unless there’s specific requirements in the statute.)
DOGE's mandate expired July 4th 2025.
It's absurd to argue the executive can intentionally delay and shuffle money earmarked specifically for certain purposes, like USAID. Why not just give the executive all power over the Treasury? Why have Congress at all?
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was an bill rescinding already appropriated 2025 USAID funding in July 2025: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
But again DOGE acted before that was in place. All I’m saying is I expect a future DOJ to find legal grounds for going ofter those involved for exceeding their authority.
What makes you think the impoundment process requires the executive to wait until Congress acts? Impoundment is a rule that says “you have to spend this money.” The appropriations bills give budget authority over a year or multiple years. Why can’t the executive act first then ask congress to rescind money he isn’t going to spend for the rest of the year?
I think appointing people who absolutely should not be doing the jobs they are appointed to is a way of sidestepping all law. They want to destroy all government and what better way to do it than through sheer incompetence with a layer of plausible deniability.
There are other theories of course.
I guess your point of view makes sense if you think of “government” as some self-sustaining organism where voting is supposed to nudge the ship but can’t steer it. Fortunately, that isn’t the government the founders created.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
That is not true. Funds are not allocated "for the State department". There is a statutory purpose for every allocated dollar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261784#50265886
As I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
This article isn't about that, though? USAID was never designated as an independent agency. But it was a statutory agency, which means that the President was required to run it according to its statutory structure.
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
I was responding to the following comment:
> I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
You’re right that this doesn’t have to do with the unitary executive. That’s my point. It’s about things like the impoundment control act.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
[1] - http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF
[2] - https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/Division%20F%2...
But in mid-2025 there was a bill that rescinded already appropriated funds: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
And for 2026 the appropriations bills allocated the money directly to the state department.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
> Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws
The impoundment control act specifically provides for Congress to resend previously appropriate spending if the president doesn’t want to spend it. nothing in the empowerment control act that clearly prevents the president from freezing spending for a short period within a single given budget year before asking Congress to resend particular appropriations.
You just can't do it, can you? Take the L man, you just got schooled and you refuse to admit it.
You are mistaken about how the impoundment process works.
I suggest you read:
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/u-s-foreign-aid-fre...
I suggest you read the actual appropriations bills. E.g. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4665...
The USAID budget in 2024 was almost $35 billion annually. If you search the budget bill for amounts “apportioned to” USAID, you will not find $35 billion of annual budget authority specifically to USAID. Much of USAID’s funding is appropriated to the President and apportioned to State. State has broad powers to transfer the funds: https://uscode.house.gov/us/usc/119-134/t22/s2675/
There is a complex web of statues and regulations that applies to the state department specifically. There is a reason these lawsuits have not gone anywhere.
It is pretty clear what the goal was here: to do an end run around spending money that was already appropriately earmarked. You can twist and turn all you want but that's what it was and no amount of seeking justification after the fact is going to change that.
The problem is that if you see everything through the twin lenses of paper and power that you risk losing your humanity. USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close. Seeing it shut down killed people, pure and simple, and whether that may have not been the goal (it may well have been the goal, I do not know) the outcome is the same.
Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering makes for an interesting test in character, morals and ultimately in actual justice.
And therein lies the reason why these lawsuits have not gone anywhere. But nobody's fooled. Well, ok, maybe you are.
> It is pretty clear what the goal was here: to do an end run around spending money that was already appropriately earmarked.
Yes, that was the goal. But the statute expressly allows for that goal: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11374.
> USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close.
There was a time when it did that, yes. But it began as a State Department front to interfere in the politics of third world countries and ultimately returned to such activities. There's a reason Mexico's President, who hates Trump, supported shutting it down: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu... ("During a press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for shutting down USAID, criticizing the agency's role in funding organizations she described as working against Mexican interests.").
I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
> Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering
I've been on HN since the Obama administration, and you won't find a single post from me defending federal bureaucratic privilege under any administration. I simply do not believe that the bureaucracy is a branch of government in and of itself. The federal bureaucracy is not in our constitution--it is a European import from admirers of the Prussian bureaucracy: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-german-stamp-on-wilsons-a....
> I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
Is there anything that you won't twist to justify your hero's actions?
The hypocrisy on display here is off the scale.
> > are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect
Elections certainly have consequences, and I wish acting outside constitutional scope had consequences, too. (maybe this specific issue is within scope or there is a reasonable question about it, but so many other issues seem unreasonably out of scope, IMHO)
Hopefully "treason has consequences" will be the meme in 2029.
I'd love to see that but I doubt it will happen. It didn't happen before when it should have either. Hope springs eternal I guess.
It actually did happen to quite a lot of people.
Well, let's see then. The day any of these characters goes behind bars I'll be celebrating.
i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
If you vote to throw the rules in the hopper the rules will be thrown in the hopper. That's just how it works.
I don't really respect this idea.
49.8% of people voted for "this". After he disavowed Project 2025 which was a bit of a boogeyman prospect.
But, turns out, yes, he was Mr 2025. He also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs (big promises of reproductive care access for example), or anything else. He elected himself to ally with dictators and foreign powers, to rip up and destroy the government.
We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this. And I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress, to use the FCC for jawboning, to use the DOJ as a puppet, to go after non-violent student protestors, to... It just goes on and on.
The people who did vote for this have been lied to by the Republican controlled media. The powell memorandum is real, and these people have been sold lies. It's almost a miracle that the truth is just so in the face of the lies that the propaganda lies sold to tear down and destroy the USA are going to be so evidently false that even huge swarths of red America won't be able to keep their head in the sand and slumber through another round of billionaire insurrection with the same ease they've supported it for for decades.
We don't get to just tear everything down because of one election.
You’re making a should argument instead of a can argument.
Get and stay engaged in elections to prevent this. Norms and laws are only as powerful as the people in power.
> he disavowed Project 2025
GOP voters will somehow find the sex trafficking cabal in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor and Obama's illuminati connections but when asked to connect Trump to P2025 it's, "he said he hasn't read it, case closed."
> also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs
If only the 2020 money printer or the ACA "repeal and replace" that never happened could have warned us of this.
> ally with dictators and foreign powers
Kim, Putin, MBS... all his best friends/financiers before 2024.
> We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this.
They either voted for this or they can't be bothered to use recent memory to inform their voting decisions.
> I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress...
For some, he's exactly the president to land these questions in front of the Supreme Court, whose majority loves unitary executive and hates stare decisis. For others, he's allowed to try without consequence because SCOTUS declared presidential actions to have absolute immunity.
That's the thing about liars - they lie. I don't think you get to claim that voting for a liar isn't voting for a bunch of lies or that it's only voting for the things he lied and said he supported. It was well known he was a liar, and anyone who believed he wasn't in 2024 was deluding themselves.
I don’t want any of this to slide. I weep for the institutions that were destroyed, the faith in those institutions and our standing on the global stage. The apathy of voters, failures of Biden to step aside or the DNC to oust him in a timely manner and the alienation of the working class by the party that cares for them are all incredible failures. I dedicated thousands and thousands of dollars to attempt to stop DJTs reelection. “Elections have consequences” isn’t defeatest-it is a call to arms that people need to engage more in the election process.
The US is hardly alone in this. The UK voted to shoot themselves in the face, because brown people are scary.
Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.
It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".
The UK's Brexit fuck-up was somewhat different in that the referendum didn't have clear rules or objectives. No minimum majority was specified (e.g. referendum will often specify that there has to be >5% majority) and the "Brexit" was not at all specified which meant years of arguments about "soft" or "hard" Brexit.
I voted Remain, and it's not entirely fair to say that all pro-Brexiters were racist, but the racists did certainly vote that way.
But that is exactly what happened. He ran on deportations, ending the war in Ukraine, and Project 2025. He explicitly said he was going to do as much as possible through executive action. SCOTUS has already shown its deference to him.
And the American people elected Trump and gave him both houses. There is very, little that can be done until his term is up. Norms mean nothing when you re-elect the guy famous for creating the world of alternative facts.
I worked as a contractor for USAID. A lot of the people that worked there were spies. They shut it down because they weren't 'their' spies. Some people voted in the president to dismantle the deep state, and he did, but he just replaced them with the deeper state who probably eat children.
But he was elected, which qualifies him. The voters voted for this sort of thing. Not in the exact details, but that's why it's a representative democracy instead of a direct one.
Trumps not 28.
But also the voters voted for Trump to execute the laws passed by Congress. Which law said get rid of USAID?
I'll also add, which law said create DOGE?
The fact that it was called a "Department" when it wasn't even technically a department makes me think Congress didn't authorize anything, and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
The country is run by literal 90-year-olds deferring to whoever is against the other party.
> ... and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
^^^ This right here. In nearly every other job, you refuse to do your job (or worse yet, do the opposite of your job while "on the clock" at work), you're pretty much instantly fired, and sometimes (depending on the severity of your violation) you're even prosecuted.
They voted for Trump specifically because he would not just follow common practice and would actually shake things up.
Which is why they’re so upset he shook stuff up with Iran?
He won at a time where the incumbent bias was like -10. He won the same reason Biden won in 2020; by not being the guy in charge.
They're not upset about Iran. Most of them still think today's oil prices are Biden's fault.
USAID was not the only victim.
https://youtu.be/zhsmHxo0nvE
Did his actions exceed the authority granted to the executive branch which employed him?
Spending is supposed to be decided by congress not the executive branch so quite obviously yes.
Budget allocation, and managing authority are different things, though.
That is true, but its also true that impoundment is a crime.
So that means congress exercised their authority to check and balance the executive and everything turned out ok?
If there's no record, was the executive really employing him?
When things get allegedly autopenned under Biden's administration: THE PRESIDENT'S AUTHORITY IS BEING HIJACKED!
When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.
Are we going to prosecute these people or what?
they are, at best, woefully corrupt and abusive.
they are, in all likelihood, foreign agents or acting on behalf of them.
It's hard not to see this as actual treason.
I suspect only if the election goes drastically against the current administration.
Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.
If he actually gives up power in 2029 I'm pretty sure he'll do a mass pardon. But since presidents aren't supposed to pardon themselves I wouldn't be surprised if it can be struck down.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, they could simply decide that those things that trump did weren't legal including his pardons. Sure, there will be a lot of pushback but if nothing is done against this kind of behavior you can set your watch for the next installment of fascism light.
I do think his pardon would stand if he didn't pardon himself. But can you picture him not doing that?!
One can hope. The tide seems to be turning with Trump becoming toxic to a majority of voters.
If the GOP loses big in the midterms, we might finally see MAGA and the GOP turn on each other in an internecine frenzy.
Democrats are to timid to deliver any form of justice, that is of course assuming elections will happen at all.
>Democrats are to timid to deliver any form of justice
You misspelled "complicit."
Seems to be plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I'd like to see them all rounded up and put in prison indefinitely. Denied bail and left there while their crimes are documented. Everybody connected to DOGE should be in prison, all the way up to Elon.
Really? Explain.
There's something about the trick of abusing a process set up to hire temporary staff quickly for overseas disasters and pandemics to take over and destroy a government department you don't like that feels LLM-like to me.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
Just about every one of these guys looks like a character in KOTOR in early to mid dark side alignment. Thin, pale faces with dark, sunken eyes.
That will become a point in a court...
We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.
> We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years
I know their tendancy to have wiring faults could certainly stand to be improved but jeez, that's a bit harsh
Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. What they pulled in gutting the government was far worse than anything the CIA has done.
The whole episode gave me the distinct feeling that the US had finally become a true Latin American country: it had a caudillo appointed by the CIA.
Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
It will be interesting to see whether in the next Admin/Congress , if Democrat, will investigate and declare these actions unlawful (done without Congressional approval) and whether a new DOJ will investigate the individuals like this DOGE dude as having broken the law for operating outside their authority because the proper procedures weren’t followed. It’s going to be interesting to see whether/who winds up in jail.
Interesting to see how USAID in the title is like the bat signal for scumbags
Huh? Can you elaborate?
Certain political topics bring out bots and narrative-pushing. It's very obvious with certain topics.
omg have the political bots been directed at Hacker News. WTH?
this has been going on for ages, mate.
HN doesn't have the kind of filters that the big social media platforms do, either.
HN has plenty of filters, just not those ones. Detected LLM writing is automatically flagged, and they do something with IP address too.
Love to see HN political bot comment graph like if and when there was a surge of them over time (US elections or other countries elections). Like did the Ukraine blowing up Yandex's data center(s) have any effect?
Have been for years.
Plenty of these right-wing posters are names I recognize who've been here for years. It's not all bots, there's plenty of "organic" Trump supporters.
So who issued his paychecks?
That 28 year old is responsible for around the same number of deaths as the Rwandan genocide. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=proj...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
So are we equating Not preventing a death with causing a death?
Actively stopping something that prevented a death is causing a death. If you cut the brakes on somebody's car, you caused a death by interfering with its prevention.
Just the deaths of hundreds of thousands, nothing to see here.
To save 0.3% of the budget.
Didn't even do that--just about everything DOGE claimed was AI mistakes.
This type of strategy is almost the only way to get rid of these kinds of agencies. You'd end up with a million raodblocks being tossed up if you tried it any other way.
Right, because there shouldn't be any roadblocks when you're taking an action that has a high probability of resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying.
Congress can and should pass a law to dismantle an agency they created. There is no real roadblock once that is done.
DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency. Also focusing on where majority of spending occurs where we could get biggest bang for the improved efficiency. After this good luck selling someone on another round of efficiency improvements.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
There is a book about DOGE, "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State" by Michael Lewis. In a recent interview he said, that after researching DOGE and its actions he believes something similar what you said, that DOGE was only a smoke screen or distraction for a larger transfer of executive power.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
Chesterton's Fence is no joke.
DOGE was people that believed bird-brained AIs could find problems. Accurately.
DOGE was created to kill brown babies.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.