Leading legal analysts say we are headed for a constitutional crisis in America. (So have Washington Monthly Contributing Writers Peter M. Shane and Joshua A. Douglas.) Their argument, which I share, is that the system of checks and balances that has served us well for some 230 years is teetering into the junkyard. The Trump administration, hell-bent on unilaterally usurping the power of the purse that the Constitution gives to Congress, has granted extraordinary powers to an unelected official who says he will put the foreign aid program administered by USAID into the “wood chipper.” The statutorily created civil service is on the block, too. ”
It is not uncommon for an aging monarch to have a trusted adviser serve as a hatchet man. Pharaoh had Joseph to interpret his dreams, and the Ottoman sultans always had a grand vizier to give needed advice. Tsarina Alexandra had Rasputin. So, it should not be surprising that Donald Trump, who turns 80 next year, found someone to supervise government downsizing, the end of the “deep state.” Elon Musk fits the profile neatly at 53, to serve as the hand of the king.
Usually, the autocrat is far richer than his prime minister and much more powerful. In choosing Elon Musk, foreign-born (like two of his three wives) and self-made (unlike himself), Trump has selected the planet’s wealthiest nabob—net worth: $402 billion—who shared Trump’s inaugural stand with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ($252 billion), who edges Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($249 billion). Of course, Bezos’s costly divorce may have cramped his style.
Trump put Musk in charge of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. The department is named for the Musk-supported Dogecoin, the “people’s crypto,” but it is most assuredly not an actual department like the ones he is dismantling.
Musk’s MAGA remit is to break things irreparably. As Senator Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat, says, “The so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, led by Musk and his cronies, is working its way through the federal government like malware.”
Born in apartheid South Africa, Musk perhaps forgot to read the Constitution of the United States. Our government was launched to “form a more perfect union, establish justice…provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” It was organized to tax and spend. It charged Congress to determine how much to spend and on what, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk.
Let’s start with the National Institutes of Health, the country’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which aims to prevent and control infectious and chronic diseases and respond to emergencies like pandemics and bioterrorism. This is not woke DEI. It’s life and death.
Healthcare is an oversized item in America. It has accounted for 17.6 percent of GDP or roughly $4.9 trillion.
In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Cancer research is the top area where NIH grants are awarded; it is hardly a woke agenda, either.
When a university researcher receives a federal grant, the money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and pay support staff. This funding is built into university budgets, and last year, it comprised about 26 percent of the grant money distributed. The administration says it will cap such indirect funding at 15 percent.
So, what does this mean? Six New York schools that obtained $2.4 billion received $953 million for indirect costs. Calculating the indirect costs ineligible for grant money under the Musk formula, only $220 million is allowed for overhead, a loss of $723 million.
But it is not just blue states. The burden will fall on states nationwide. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million and $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six Ohio schools received about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four Missouri schools received about $830 million; they would lose $212 million. No wonder Senator Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican, has called for targeted cuts, and her fellow GOP conference member, Susan Collins of Maine, joined the criticism.
A new lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court disputing the overhead limit that Team Musk confected offers some hope. The judge entered a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump-Musk administration from reducing health research grants. However, there is disturbing evidence that the administration has not complied with the judge’s order. Only the 22 states that have sued will be entitled to relief. They are almost all blue: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. Other states would still be subject to the cuts.
But there has always been the logrolling. The same Republicans who complain about Democrats’ tax and spending policies are also the ones taking disproportionate tax money. Politico reports they claim to be enthusiastic about the DOGE cuts but are mobilizing to ensure their state programs won’t suffer. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, insists that states can advise on the most effective cuts. “Instead of just across the board cutting, we thought, man, they need some help from the governors to say, ‘We can be more efficient in this area or this area, or if you allow block grants in this area, you can reduce our expenditures by 10 percent.’ And so that’s our goal.”
The traditional piñata of the right has been foreign aid. We give a handout to foreign countries, some conservatives argue, and we get little in return. So, USAID is getting whacked not through a normal democratic give-and-take between Congress and the executive branch but through unilateral action led by Musk, echoed by Trump, and now dumped in the lap of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a past champion of USAID, who vows to preserve the agency’s most worthy pursuits under his leadership as acting director.
Foreign aid accounts for $72 billion or roughly 1.2 percent of total spending. Defenders of USAID argue that the programs promote national security, counter global moves by China, prevent disease here, and champion our values. There is also the impact of USAID cuts on American farmers. The Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with USAID, purchases roughly $700 million worth of food and agricultural products for international food aid programs. A federal court temporarily unfroze USAID money, but over the weekend, farmers reported that their funding remained frozen—another blow to farmers facing threats of tariffs and freezes to foreign-aid spending that involved food purchased from American producers. A judge has ordered that the government continue to get them their money. Yet, Musk has shuttered USAID, its logo dismantled outside its Washington headquarters. Again, Congress never approved of this wholesale disembowelment, but the supine Republican leadership on Capitol Hill is happy to let the executive branch have its way.
Then, make way for the Trump-Musk tariffs, lest they be overlooked with fireworks over the Musk “wood chipping.” London’s Financial Times greeted its readers the other day with the headline “US and China headed for trade war as Beijing launches retaliatory tariffs.” After Trump unveiled an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods to punish Beijing for its fentanyl ending up in the U.S. and Mexico, China counterpunched, plastering a 10-15 percent tariff on U.S. energy exports and farm equipment.
On Monday, the president announced 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. steel and aluminum imports, targeting our number one trading partner, Canada, and significant trading partners, Mexico and the Emirates. These tariffs are designed to respond to other countries’ trade behavior and protect export industries in battleground states. They are distinct from the penalty tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which he suspended last week, and are aimed at nontrade behavior. Hold on to your gowns, ladies. We are in the middle of a trade war.
The only real hope for an abatement is in the federal courts. Last I counted, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against Trump’s “shock and awe” government makeover. State attorneys general, unions, and NGOs have sued nationwide to complicate Trump’s plan, modeled neatly on Project 2025, which he said he never read during the campaign.
A judge I know suggests that convulsive moves like those from Trump and Musk will trigger democratic, sober responses from the judiciary. He said the key point for the courts is ensuring no one branch of government gets too much power. This jurist may be correct, but what this Supreme Court, with its extreme deference to executive power, will make of it all is anybody’s guess. If five justices can invent presidential immunity, a majority may let him have his way with Congressionally authorized agencies and departments.
On other fronts, suits are challenging the constitutionality of the executive order revoking birthright citizenship, suits to prevent Musk and his tech bros from accessing the sensitive Treasury Department payment and data system, suits challenging the ban on transgender people in the military, suits seeking to erase Trump’s bar on gender-affirming care for minors, and suits blocking Trump’s efforts to modify civil service protections.
The courts have been quick, if not definitive, to throttle Trump’s moves. They have imposed temporary restraining orders, forbidding such matters as exposing the identities of the F.B.I. agents who investigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol, allowing Muskovites access to the Treasury Department’s systems, wheedling civil servants to accept a “deferred resignation” package, and freezing $3 trillion in congressionally approved spending.
Trump may choose to ignore court orders. This already happened in Rhode Island, where Judge John McConnell ordered Trump officials to comply with “the plain text” of an edict he issued last month unfreezing billions of dollars in federal grants. He chided them Monday for noncompliance but did not start slamming the administration with penalties.
In a social media post, Vice President JD Vance claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” If the president tells the federal courts to stuff it, there will surely be a constitutional crisis and a failed presidency.
Andrew Jackson famously defied the Supreme Court in the 1830s when it ruled that Georgia’s laws interfering with Cherokee sovereignty were unconstitutional. The result was shameful: The Cherokee were forcibly removed from Georgia in a “Trail of Tears” in which 4,000 perished due to disease, starvation, and exposure.
A portrait of Jackson hangs close to Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.
