I don't know? To this day people still fuss about concentration camps here, while the leader clearly had given authority to do so. People are just too political these days.
By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?
President doesn't have authority to shut them down by EO either. Congress does, yes.
(It's one of those "power of the purse" things. If Congress has created an organization and funded it, the executive is required to spend that money on it.)
I imagine the legality of that depends on the exact details of the law that created the organization. If it specifies that it be an independent organization, then that's probably not allowed either. If it's just "these things must be done" then State could probably handle it.
(Either way, the exact approach they've taken so far with the total freeze and shutdown, then later saying they'll totally start doing the job again somewhere else later on, seems sketchy.)
The state dept issued an evacuation order for all USAID staff overseas. How will they accomplish their mission? This includes medical care and distribution of HIV medication to up to 20 million people.
Yeah, that why I said both. It depends on what they are doing. USAID probably needs congress, but other things might just need an EO. The point is DOGE isn't doing this, the President is. Elon doesn't have authority that Democratics are saying he does. He simply informs the President, "Hey, USAID is spending taxpayers money to fund xyz in xyz you might want to shut it down". The President then goes "Yeah, I think we should shut it down let's freeze it and we'll abolish it". Then they go down the path of abolishing it and with the USAID they will probably get congress to do it. Until then they can freeze it because he appoint Marco Rubio has the acting admin.
That man is way too friendly. Just before the election he gave $300.000.000,00 to Trump. And he is so special, eh! He can read air-gaped, highly sensitive data that no one should see from government systems, just using his mind/indoctrinated minions. I hate it when people speculate this might have to do, amongst things, with dark money to be made in intelligence/elite level international crime.
Neither him nor Trump ever hid what Elon was going to do if Trump was elected. Unlike other donators of both parties, we always knew what Elon's goal was. He literally spent the last year on Twitter tweeting about it.
Many people, especially libertarians, voted for Trump for this exact reason.
Yeah, you might think he shouldn't have access to these system but it's the President, who the majority of the people voted for, that has the authority to grant him access, or ask for access from the appoint leaders of these departments.
Everyday when he posts list of things the US government is spending money on the more people are backing Elon in this endeavor.
Go here https://x.com/DOGE and read some of the things we are paying for and you tell me that we should be spending money on it.
Yeah, you might think he up to something bad but you would have always thought that because you don't like him.
Are you sure he's not just an American who cares about the US and doesn't want it too head into a death spiral from massive amount of debt with no one brave enough to stop it because it might cause them to lose an election?
That would make the executive orders illegal, or at best invalid. It wouldn't make DOGE illegal. DOGE is private citizens giving their opinions about how the government should work to a politician who happens to be listening to them (for now, but probably not long given that politician's track record for getting into feuds with former allies.)
Citizens voicing their opinions about the government is clear cut First Ammendment activity, of precisely the sort the first ammendment was intended to protect in the first place. People need to get a grip.
> DOGE is private citizens giving their opinions about how the government should work to a politician who happens to be listening to them
No, DOGE was formalized as a division of the US Digital Service. Employees of DOGE are federal government employees. Some of them, like Elon are "Special Government Employees" which is a short-term category and avoids certain disclosures.
Creating DOGE and enabling them to have access to certain IT systems is legal ... but what data, how much control they have, what they can demand of other departments is subject to all sorts of laws and controls which may or may not be being followed at the moment.
Okay, so these citizens are federal employees. Guess what, the First Ammendment still gives them the right to tell politicians what they should be doing.
That sounds weird. I can understand that you cannot take money that was promised for thing X and spend in thing Y but if you can reduce the X spending I don't think there is any issue.
Now I do not know if Congress has explicitly required X to provide certain thing. If they did then there might be some issue if X fails to provide it. It's probably easy to say someone is accountable for it if it's something objective (let's say building for Congress) but if it's subjective it could get tricky.
No wonder everyone always tries to figure out how to spend money if they still have some left before end of the fiscal year. Some individual "I saved us $1 million by shutting down servers we don't use!" Manager "Fuck, now need to quickly figure out some way to spend $1 million..."
Correct. But Congress doesn't and didn't ever say "spend $250k on transgender operas." Congress' laws are ambiguous and rely on the administrative state to dish out money to a specific cause. The law probably said something like "promote health policy in the Europe".
The Trump administration will repurpose those funds to things more aligned with GOP preferences.
neither have happened and virtually all employees of USAID have been put on leave at the orders of the acting deputy administrator.
(via CNN) - It is not legal for the president to unilaterally “abolish, move, or consolidate USAID”. He needs to have congressional authorization to do so.
DOGE gets its authority through the president. The president definitely has the authority to audit and/or stop illegal, fraudulent or just wasteful transactions.
The exact shape or form of USAID is also up to the president. It was created through an executive order, and can of course also be transformed through one.
It was consolidated into the Department of State as part of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 as an agency with an administrator and responsibility for administrating the distribution of aid under certain preexisting laws. So it is straightforwardly outside of the authority of the president to disband the agency, as Congress has provided that it shall exist. And it is likewise outside of the authority of the president to reduce it to an inactive status, as it has certain Congressionally-established responsibilities that it must perform.
I have seen this regurgitated several times on this site now. This is blatantly false, congress passed a law in 1998 to establish USAID. The EO was made with authority that had been granted by another law.
That law does not allow the President to abolish it:
> Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization plan submitted under section 6601 of this title, and except as provided in section 6562 of this title, there is within the Executive branch of Government the United States Agency for International Development as an entity described in section 104 of title 5.
The actual law is a high dimensional interaction of all active legislation. Predicting what the legal system will do is hard and often cannot be achieved with high reliability with a google search.
This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield useful prediction making capability.
Also malicious compliance is an option. Maybe they could name a single person the official administrator, given them an office in a basement and officially comply, while effectively shutting everything down. The extent to which fulfilling the intent of legislation vs relying on the discretion of the executive to interpret it within, and as a matter of precedent deferring to executive discretion by default in court cases, probably enables many more abuses than have been contemplated prior to this presidency.
Unless they are paying that person in the basement the full funding of what Congress has budgetted for USAID that's Impoundment. If they are then it's still Impoundment because it's been redirected from it's original purpose.
The OP asserted that USAID was created by EO and that the president is free to do what he wants with it. That statement is blatantly false. How does court decide is not relevant to this discussion, because as you said it is speculative.
DOGE didn’t shut down USAID. Musk talked Trump and Rubio into doing it and they did.
Musk is essentially a presidential advisor, and legally an advisor can advise the President to do pretty much anything. Even if the thing they are advising the President to do is illegal, the President is the one who bears the legal responsibility for the action, not the advisor.
In really extreme cases, like if Musk were advising Trump to commit genocide, or carry out a military coup, or transfer a billion dollars out of US Treasury into someone’s personal bank account, and Trump followed the advice, Musk might be held legally liable for having given it. But shutting down a government agency isn’t anything like that. The legality of shutting it down is debatable, but even if ultimately held to be illegal, it isn’t the genocide or military coup or blatant corruption kind of illegal.
By the way, I heard the Palestinian Problem is going to be solved for good?