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**Hugh** · 12-02-2025, 09:28

Article linked to the video above (Washington Post)

https://wapo.st/42MJOt2

Quote:

“We are going to be signing a very important deal today,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “It’s DOGE.” He said that his administration had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.”

Beside him was Musk, who said: “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”

“It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix,” he added.

Neither Trump nor Musk provided specifics about the corruption they found or how they plan to address it.

Quote:

Last week, a federal judge halted the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation program,” which offers federal workers a way to quit and receive pay through September, while weighing a legal challenge. The program is the Trump administration’s most sweeping attempt yet to drastically cut the federal government.

“They’re getting a good deal. They’re getting a big buyout,” Trump said Tuesday of the program. “What we’re trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people.”

Trump said federal office space is “occupied by 4 percent.” But that number conflicts with a congressionally mandated report issued in August by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that federal employees who were eligible for telework were still spending more than 60 percent of their work hours on-site.

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Interesting article from a lawyer who served as associate White House counsel under President Ronald Reagan and as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush.

https://wapo.st/4hSE7Ox

Quote:

President Donald Trump, his appointees, acting officials and quasi-official outsiders are in the midst of a radical restructuring or termination of government employees, agencies and programs. Whether this is in all, many or some regards desirable is debatable. Also debatable is whether the 49.8 percent of the electorate who elected Trump want all of this, and whether the 50.2 percent who voted for Kamala Harris or a third-party candidate want any of it.

What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.

The Constitution is well known to interpose meaningful checks and balances and a separation of powers among the responsibilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is also well understood that the respective branch’s powers and duties will intersect and overlap. Fundamentally, however, all legislative power belongs to Congress, and executive power to the president. The judiciary steps in when the parameters of shared authority get complicated or confusing and constitutional lines are crossed.

The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are nation of laws, not men and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power.

Where the president identifies policy areas that need reform or spending that needs to be supplemented, reduced or eliminated, the Constitution empowers him to recommend such measures as he finds “necessary or expedient” to Congress for it to dispose one way or the other, or alternatively ignore.

Yes, the president may advance his own policy agenda — including, of course, the ability to recommend reforms to Congress that he believes necessary or expedient. But there is no reading of the Constitution that allows any president to claim that a political mandate, or a political promise made, obviates or supersedes the role for Congress. It is the House and Senate that “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for … the Government of the United States or in any Department or Officer thereof.”