If you turn your television on these days, you shouldn’t be surprised to see political rallies in front of federal buildings with animated and spending-abdicated political gas bags screaming at the top of their voices. Their complaint? Well, that we’re ending wasteful government spending and doing so with a presidential appointee leading the charge. These legislative malcontents maintain that the appointment of Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) represents a “constitutional crisis.” Oh really?
Those who have assigned Musk to Mussolini-like status declare with spitting outrage that “He is unelected!” True. He has never been elected to anything. Nor have the tens of thousands of federal employees who spend your money, some of whom do so wisely and others, unwisely. DOGE is ferreting out the unwise side of that equation and having some early success.
Musk wasted no time centering his attention on agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In 1961 President John F. Kennedy created it by executive order it with the stroke of his pen. Now President Donald J. Trump seems intent on closing it down using a similar method. The big spenders in Washington are overwrought by that threat and have called the Musk investigation of USAID a “constitutional crisis.” Somewhere along the line they didn’t learn that constitutionally the President can giveth and taketh away.
Some research is in order here. Is it a constitutional crisis if a President used his executive power to create an arm of government, like DOGE, to help him execute his duties under the Constitution? Consider the authority given to the President in Article II Section 1 of the Constitution.
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Section II notes this of executive power:
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”
It is clear that the founders intended for the President to administer the government and gave him “executive power” to do so. They had no interest in a figurehead President. That’s exactly what existed in the failed Articles of Confederation that the Founders wisely supplanted with our Constitution in 1787. They wanted a strong President. We have that today.
Think about it. The Congress may authorize building a new aircraft carrier, but the President mans it and set the rules for its use. Indeed, he can hire or fire the ship’s leadership and crew for cause. In fact, he can order the vessel to sit idle in port unmanned. That may upset Congress, but it’s not a constitutional crisis. It’s literally constitutional.
The same can be said of federal agencies that were created by a President. They can indeed be summarily ended by a President as easily as they were brought to life through presidential executive order. Equally true is a president’s prerogative to man or unman a federal agency—even firing its leaders and crew—if he does so within the constitutional power vested in him as the President.
Elon Musk is providing much fodder for the President to end USAID and likely other agencies whose efficacy over the years has been disproven. It’s time for some of them to go. And for those who see the Federal government as essential to their very existence—indeed their political livelihood—the threat that agencies might be disbanded is as serious a threat as a knife to the throat. The profligate spenders in Congress have decided to die on a hill called “Government Waste.” Their battle cry is “We have a Constitutional Crisis!”
More cynical than false claims of a constitutional crisis is how these big spenders claim they are defending federal workers. They are not. In fact, Congress has for years set them up to be blamed for its own malfeasance. Federal workers who do their jobs and follow the law are not the problem.
The problem is how Congress has shirked its constitutional duty by leaving it to bureaucracies to interpret laws that Congress was too cowardly to define itself. Moreover, spendthrifts in Congress collude with political allies at the top level of agencies, who are inclined to expand spending programs that politicians then cite as evidence to reelect them.
So, the irony of agitated big spenders fulminating over cuts to wasteful spending and referring to it as a “constitutional crisis” is a constitutional crisis of its own. Frankly, if a president fails to rein in wasteful government spending, that alone would be a constitutional crisis through abdication of Article II duties!
The only constitutional “crisis” in Washinton D.C. today are the red-faced and ignorant congressional members who haven’t bothered to read the Constitution.
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