Humbug: why Congress is letting Musk and Trump take over its job

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

— Elon Musk on X

It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation.

— Relief worker in Sudan, quoted in The Washington Post 2/4/25

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Talk about efficiency: it’s only February, and the Republicans have already found their leading man to play Scrooge this year. I ended my last essay by commenting on what are now called the “optics” of the world’s richest man bragging about shutting down an agency that helps keep the world’s poorest people from dying of disease and starvation.

But just for now, let’s forget about optics. Even setting aside the obvious moral issues of letting poor Africans die so that rich Americans can have one more tax cut, there is an important legal issue here: the president cannot destroy what Congress creates, and he cannot withhold money that Congress has appropriated. What Trump and Musk are doing — not just to USAID, but throughout the federal government — is illegal and unconstitutional.

Understanding of the U. S. Constitution seems to be at an all-time low. I’m beginning to think that I was extremely lucky to learn the basics of the Constitution at an early age. If you were so fortunate as to attend Harry C. Withers Elementary School in Dallas in the mid-60s, Mrs. Harford would’ve taught you what the three branches of the Federal government were for: the legislative branch makes the laws, the executive enforces the laws, and the judicial branch interprets the laws.

That’s a lot of emphasis on laws — but that will be a topic of a future essay. For now, we are concerned with the relationship between Congress and the president as spelled out by the Constitution. It begins with the Congress: Article I, section 1 begins: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Congress makes the laws, not the president. The fact that the Constitution begins with Congress shows how important the founders considered it. In fact, the country got along without a president for its first thirteen years — under the Articles of Confederation, there was only a Congress. As far as the president is concerned, Article II, section 3 states that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

The Constitution also gives Congress “the power of the purse” — the ability to collect taxes and decide how they should be spent. Article I, section 8 begins: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The legislature’s power of the purse goes back well beyond even the Articles of Confederation. Before the Revolution, Americans were British subjects, and the British Parliament held the power of the purse going back to the Middle Ages. In earlier times, Parliament could only meet when the King or Queen summoned it, but the monarch often had to call Parliament when he or she needed money, say, to fight a war, because only Parliament could raise taxes.

When the American colonists cried, “No taxation without representation,” they were not inventing a new political concept; they were only asking for a right which every English gentleman living on the island had — the right to elect a representative to Parliament, which alone could raise taxes.

When Congress appropriates money to the president to carry out a task, the president is obligated to spend that money — “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Past presidents have challenged that obvious interpretation from time to time — notably Nixon, who refused to carry out an environmental program he disagreed with — so to make things perfectly clear, Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, making it illegal for the president to impound — to withhold or delay spending — money Congress has appropriated, unless the president asks for and receives Congressional permission to do so.

After Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961, mandating an agency that would be in charge of delivering foreign aid, President Kennedy created USAID. It was to be an independent agency under the direction of the Secretary of State. If the current president wishes to change the name of the agency or even restructure the State Department, he is free to do so, as long as he is carrying out the will of Congress in passing that law and appropriating funds to the agency. That is not what is happening.

First, President Trump ordered a 90-day “pause” in all foreign aid by the United States government. Then Musk announced that he and Trump were shutting down USAID. Musk was speaking in his capacity as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, an entity created by Trump and Musk with the avowed aim of rooting out fraud and waste. It is not really a department — in the federal government, a department is a major division of government, like the Department of Defense or Department of State. A true department must be created by Congress, and its leader must be approved by the Senate.

A president is free to get advice from whomever he pleases, but Trump has given Musk extraordinary power to act with no approval from Congress. The Constitution is clear on this point: the president “with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.”

When Musk’s minions entered the offices of USAID and demanded access to its most sensitive data, a senior official of USAID tried to stop them. Why wouldn’t he, given that not all of Musk’s employees had the proper security clearance, and that Musk’s entire operation is probably illegal? That senior official was put on indefinite leave.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who then took charge of USAID, accused its former leaders of “rank insubordination” for defending their agency against Musk’s illegal attack. Later, Rubio put the great majority of USAID’s 10,000 employees on “indefinite administrative leave.”

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Speaker of the House, defended Trump’s executive order thus: “The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating. That’s what they’re doing, by putting a pause on some of these agencies and by evaluating them, by doing these internal audits.”

But why is it necessary to pause the work of USAID for 90 days in order to evaluate it? If efficiency is the goal, wouldn’t it be better to study the agency in action, and see how it operates?

A careful study of USAID may well find waste, but does that mean you have to undo all the good it does? Ninety days is plenty of time for people to starve to death. Hajooj Kuka, spokesman for a Sudanese NGO that receives assistance from USAID, said of the aid cutoff, “People are on the brink of starvation anyway … they cannot last three days or a week without food.”

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce justified the aid stoppage with this explanation: “President Trump stated clearly that the United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people.” So Trump’s position, to paraphrase JFK, is this: ask not what you can do for starving African children; ask what starving African children can do for you.

About a week after Trump’s foreign aid freeze, Rubio, no doubt reacting to outcry over the optics, issued a memo making an exception for “lifesaving” aid. But this caused more confusion, as USAID employes were left wondering what, exactly was “lifesaving.” As one USAID worker pointed out, “They got rid of all the senior lawyers. The people who would be working to clarify these things aren’t around.”

Moreover, too many people were already laid off for the humanitarian aid to get through. Food sitting in warehouses in Ethiopia continued to sit because truck drivers had already been laid off, so the food could not be distributed. And two weeks after the waiver for “lifesaving aid,” the New York Times reported that USAID’s payment system was still not functioning — it was still in the hands of the minions. This meant that temporary employees could not be hired to fill any gaps, and the organizations that partner with USAID could not be paid.

And now a federal judge has paused the foreign aid pause, but confusion still reigns, with many USAID employees laid off or uncertain of their status, and the payment system is still not working.

This is not efficiency; it is the opposite. USAID’s inspector general issued a report pointing out that, thanks to Trump’s abrupt halt in foreign aid, food supplies worth over $489 million were sitting in warehouses, in danger of spoiling. Trump’s response was to fire the inspector general.

Musk and Trump are not “uncovering” waste and fraud, as they claim. Their conclusions are not based on a careful study of the agencies they have taken over — there hasn’t been time for that. Rather, they are acting on conclusions they have already drawn. Musk’s antipathy toward USAID seems to stem from a Joe Rogan podcast last December, on which a guest made the unfounded accusation that the agency was a front for the CIA.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the shuttering of USAID by citing a news release purporting to list 12 examples of “waste and abuse” by the agency. But as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler pointed out, these “proofs” were not gathered by Musk, but “plucked from the websites of right-wing media.” After studying the claims, Kessler concluded that only one of the 12 was accurate, and that, even if correct, they all add up to a small portion of USAID’s budget — hardly enough to justify shutting the whole operation down.

Efficiency means doing a job more quickly, more cheaply or more effectively. But what Trump seems to be saying is that he doesn’t want the job of foreign aid to be done at all — at least, not without a quid pro quo. Cutting the fat out of an agency would require careful study followed by careful surgery. The methods of Trump and Musk are not like surgery so much as — well, feeding things through a wood chipper.

So why does Congress put up with this usurpation of its power? Some congressmen are speaking out: thirty-seven Democratic Senators signed a letter to Rubio asking for an explanation of “the Administration’s brazen and illegal attempts to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).” (So much for complaints that Democrats aren’t doing anything. What are they supposed to do, with Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress? All they can do is speak out and take the administration to court — they are doing both.)

But the Republican leadership in Congress has been silent while Trump and Musk take over their constitutional role. Part of the explanation is fear of Trump and his ability to “primary” them — to defeat them in the Republican primaries by backing a challenger loyal to Trump. If you don’t think this can happen, just ask my former Representative, Bob Good.

The explanation may also be that Musk and Trump are doing what Republicans have been talking about for years: making the government smaller. Reagan took office with the declaration that “government is the problem,” and since that time, anti-government rhetoric has reigned in the party. Good, who was ousted, not because of ideology but perceived disloyalty to Trump, echoed Reagan more recently when he said, “we should not fear a government shutdown. Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

So in all the years since 1980 that Republicans have been in charge, either of the White House, or Congress, or both, why hasn’t the government gotten smaller? Because Americans like the idea of cutting government spending in the abstract, but when congressmen talk about cutting specific programs, they get an earful from constituents who benefit from that program. So in order to stay in office, they keep on voting to keep government spending in place.

This explains Congress’ acquiescence in the face of Trump’s onslaught: he’s doing what Republicans in Congress they say they want, but have been afraid to do. And when constituents complain, they have a way to shift blame: “Hey, you voted for Trump, and this is what Trump said he was going to do.”

And Musk is to Trump what Trump is to Congress: a convenient villain to blame in case public outrage gets overwhelming.

Congress’ reluctance to rile constituents also explains why Musk and Trump began their government-cutting program with USAID: starving African children don’t get to vote for our Congress.

But as usual, Trump didn’t do his homework. Contrary to Trump’s — and the public’s — opinion, USAID doesn’t just dole out cash. Much of what is does is to purchase and distribute food grown by American farmers. Those farmers are already starting to complain to their representatives and senators about losing this source of income. And since farm states and rural districts are overwhelmingly Republican, we are starting to see Republican congressmen coming to the aid of foreign aid.

What’s coming is a referendum on government. Will we miss big government once it’s gone, or will we decide we’re better off without it? Government will probably win, and then we will have to spend years and lots of money building back what Trump has destroyed — there’s your fraud and waste.