[The Washington Post] Trump aides explore plans to boost Musk effort by wresting control from Congress
Debbie Bird
More depressing news.
Trump aides explore plans to boost Musk effort by wresting control from Congress
The White House could challenge or seek to change a 1974 law that blocks presidents from choosing which programs to fund.
By Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski and Jacob Bogage
Download The Washington Post app.
Jerry Rogers
Thanks for finding this Debbie. If the headline is accurate this might be the most important story we have seen for a while. I cannot get the full article, but if anyone else can I hope they will do so.
Jerry
--
--
View all the postings by visiting our homepage at:
http://groups.google.com/group/parklandsupdate?hl=en
To join the Park Land Watch group email Rick Smith: rsmit...@comcast.net This will allow you to post your messages to the PLW Group.
Membership is free
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "parklandwatch" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to parklandsupda...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/parklandsupdate/SA1PR16MB650359B37F0B8222D4DA2998825B2%40SA1PR16MB6503.namprd16.prod.outlook.com.
Debbie Bird
On Nov 14, 2024, at 9:05 AM, 'Jerry Rogers' via parklandwatch <parklan...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/parklandsupdate/000301db36af%24028021d0%2407806570%24%40yahoo.com.
Jerry Rogers
Thanks, got it.
Jerry
From: parklan...@googlegroups.com [mailto:parklan...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jimmy
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2025 3:35 PM
To: parklandwatch
Subject: Re: [PLW Update] Trump aides explore plans to boost Musk effort by wresting control from Congress
Sorry Jerry, in case this never worked for you, here the Nov 13 article is. I've been preoccupied, sorry, and caught this late. jimmy
Trump aides explore plans to boost Musk effort by wresting control from Congress
The White House could challenge or seek to change a 1974 law that blocks presidents from choosing which programs to fund.
November 13, 2024
The Washington Post By Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, and Jacob Bogage
LINK: https://wapo.st/3BVDa8N
Tech billionaire Elon Musk listens to Donald Trump during a campaign event last month in Butler, Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump announced Tuesday night that Musk will co-chair an outside panel to cut federal spending, known as the Department of Government Efficiency. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are readying unconventional strategies to implement at least some recommendations from a new government spending commission with or without congressional approval, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private deliberations.
On Tuesday, Trump announced that tech billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy would jointly lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” that would produce recommendations on overhauling U.S. agencies — an effort that people in Musk’s orbit say would aim to apply slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S.
government. The commission will officially operate outside of the administration but work with the White House budget office, Trump said.
Although changes to government spending typically require an act of Congress, Trump aides are exploring plans to challenge a 1974 budget law in a way that would give the White House the power to unilaterally adopt the Musk commission’s proposals, one of the people said. It is unclear if Trump will ask Congress to approve changes to the budget law or first appeal to the courts to do so, though aides have previously endorsed either approach. Ramaswamy, a former pharmaceutical executive who has said he would “stop funding agencies that waste money” and don’t operate on meritocratic principles, has publicly called on Congress to repeal the law and has suggested workarounds if it is not repealed.
That effort, if successful, could give Trump far greater authority to remake the federal budget on his own, altering the balance of power among the branches of government. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and many of his senior advisers publicly vowed to assert unilateral authority to rescind some federal funds, after Trump’s attempts to block aid to Ukraine led to his impeachment during his first term.
If the White House were to simply assert more power without Congress first changing the law, it could trigger a constitutional showdown over a bedrock aspect of the federal government, the power of the purse.
Some legal experts say that the courts would probably strike down any attempt to unilaterally rewrite federal spending laws, but some Trump allies are optimistic the Supreme Court, which now has a significant conservative majority, might rule in their favor. Trump’s former budget director, Russell Vought, blasted the 1974 law the day before Trump’s first term ended, saying it promoted “the very opposite of what good government should be,” and he said last year on Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast that he thought the law was unconstitutional. Vought is widely expected to return to the administration in a senior role.
Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s commission could have a far greater impact if Trump can implement its recommendations without congressional approval. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive who also owns the social media site X, has promised to cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget — a number that nonpartisan budget experts have panned as wildly unrealistic. But even partial adoption of the commission’s recommendations could have repercussions for thousands of programs and millions of federal workers. Trump also would be likely to have broad, and less controversial, authority to abolish federal regulations targeted by Musk and Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy has also proposed another workaround that wouldn’t be as controversial: cutting half a trillion dollars from programs that Congress has allowed to expire.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and occasional Trump adviser, said the incoming White House is likely to try a two-pronged strategy — asking Congress to approve Musk’s proposed spending cuts, while also testing the limits of its power to rescind funds unilaterally. Lawmakers typically safeguard their spending powers, and even many Republican lawmakers are unlikely to quickly green-light the “drastic” changes to the federal government that Trump has promised the commission would bring.
Musk has nicknamed the commission the “DOGE,” a reference to a cryptocurrency he has supported that bears the face of a Shiba Inu dog. Musk said in a tweet on Tuesday night that all of the DOGE’s actions would be posted online and that the organization would have a leaderboard “for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.” He also promised good merch. Ramaswamy told The Washington Post the commission “would not go gently.”
“There’s no reason the two can’t exist in parallel — you impound something large enough to be worth fighting for, someone sues, and you fight it out in the courts. … It’s an obvious thing to try, and I’ve heard Russ [Vought] talk about it,” Gingrich said. “And at the same time, the Musk commission’s first job is to show the American people the scale of waste and missed opportunity.”
Some Republican lawmakers welcomed the prospect of unilateral White House action on spending.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina), a member of the House Budget Committee, said in an interview that Trump and Musk should rely on impoundment authorities in part because “it’s hard enough to cut anything” in Congress.
“It’s constitutional to freeze the money and hold it up. … With Trump, we can do that,” Norman said.
But Democratic officials and even some Republicans said it would be illegal for the White House to usurp congressional authority by consolidating more power in the executive branch, and that the courts wouldn’t stand for it.
“I think it will fall short — the impoundment is just not what they think it is. They cannot sign things into law and then reshape them at their will,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative-leaning think tank. “They can’t restructure the entire government. Congress has to do it. In the end, they don’t have the authority to do it.”
Stymied by his 2019 efforts to block congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, Trump and his top allies have since promised to try to revamp federal budget law. They have in particular targeted the Impoundment Control Act, which was enacted after the Watergate scandals to limit presidential authority to withhold funding for specific programs.
As a presidential candidate, Trump said he would work with Congress to repeal the law and also said the president should have the authority to pull back funds. Mark Paoletta, who served as a budget office attorney in Trump’s first term, has also called the impoundment law “unconstitutional” and said the president should be allowed to order agencies to cancel federal spending without Congress. Ramaswamy, too, vowed to upend the budget law: “I will call on Congress to repeal or amend the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and will stop funding agencies that waste money or have outlived their purpose,” he wrote in 2023 as a presidential candidate.
Paoletta and other conservatives have argued that presidents before 1974 regularly asserted their authority to claw back federal spending. Conservatives have cited the nation’s rising fiscal imbalance to justify dramatic action to curtail spending, although the national debt rose by more than $7 trillion during Trump’s first term. The federal debt is now nearly $36 trillion and rose substantially under the Biden administration.
“Donald Trump recently announced that if he is reelected he will establish a commission on government efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, to audit government programs and recommend ‘drastic reforms’ to cut wasteful spending,” Paoletta wrote in an op-ed published in the National Review last month. “For this effort, we say, ‘Impound, baby, impound.’”
Many legal scholars have disputed their reasoning, saying the law would not countenance a situation in which “the Musk commission could identify any money they want to cancel and just say they’re not going to do it,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a budget and appropriations law expert at Georgetown Law School.
That, she said, would be “a complete workaround on what Congress has repeatedly said in statute ... is its constitutional power of the purse.”
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/parklandsupdate/74f9c222-281c-4c6f-ac29-c8fa269dee7bn%40googlegroups.com.