Before Vice President JD Vance was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, he expressed a radical sentiment now coming to fruition under President Donald Trump.
“We need a de-Ba’athification program in the U.S.,” Vance said as he called for the firing of every midlevel federal government employee and their replacement with Trump allies.
In likening the U.S. government to the purges of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in post-war Iraq, Vance provides a metaphor to explain what the Trump administration is doing now. The MAGA coalition, led by Trump, Vance and billionaire Elon Musk are an occupying force — a provisional authority — operating in wartime conditions to dismantle the U.S. government. As in post-war Iraq, the previously existing legal order is no more. For Americans, that means the Constitution has been effectively suspended.
The ongoing destruction of the U.S. government by Trump and Musk is already a full-blown constitutional crisis. The executive branch has seized power it does not have from Congress and the American people to eliminate agencies created by Congress, suspend payments authorized by law, break contracts entered into under law, rewrite the Constitution and, potentially, ignore the judiciary when push comes to shove.
All of these actions, tied together, represent not just an unprecedented seizure of executive power by the president, but an intentional subversion of the constitutional order. Or, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought wrote in 2022, “We are living in a post-Constitutional time.”
The actions Trump and Musk are taking not only threaten the country’s constitutional structure, but also the material livelihood of all Americans. In targeting government services people need to live their lives, they risk forcing people to stop working to perform childcare, throw at-risk people into homelessness, deny disabled people the right to a free life and cut off the elderly and sick from necessary health care. In seeking to end birthright citizenship, Trump threatens the very right of people born here to obtain the benefits granted to them by the Constitution.
Potentially more catastrophic, Musk’s seizure of the Department of Treasury’s payment system and the possible tinkering his college-age minions are doing to it could crash a decadesold system that doles out the annual $6 trillion budget to Social Security recipients, government employees, grantees, loan recipients and more.
Musk is deploying the model he used to gut Twitter after he bought it in 2022. It’s an expression of the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley. The tech elite believe that laws and regulations should be ignored if it gets in their way of innovation and profit-seeking. Think about Uber’s deployment of subsidized taxis to undercut incumbent competition, scooter companies dumping their product on city streets with no authorization, the mass Hoovering of data by social media companies or AI companies relying on copyrighted material to train their models.
They are also happy to break products as they beta test new applications, just as Musk’s X frequently went down after he fired huge numbers of engineers following his takeover. A disruption in the operation of a social media site, however, does not have any meaningful real world consequences. But if Musk decides to “fail whale” the government, the consequences would be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of Americans, not to mention the stability of the global economy.
Musk, the richest man in the world and head of SpaceX, Tesla and X and Trump’s largest donor in the 2024 election, is at the heart of the present crisis. Tasked by Trump to target government agencies and funding for elimination through the U.S. DOGE Service, formerly the U.S. Digital Service, Musk has deployed a team of barely drinking-age staffers to infiltrate agencies across the government. They have already taken over the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, and the General Services Administration, which oversees government buildings. And they have bullied their way into sensitive data systems to take control over the entirety of the $6 trillion annual U.S. budget. In one case, Musk’s team shuttered USAID, an agency created by a law passed by Congress.
Meanwhile, Trump’s OMB issued a memo, which has since been rescinded, directing a freeze on all government grants, loans and financial assistance that nearly caused the collapse of services for children, the disabled, the elderly, veterans, the poor and more across the country.
Payment portals for Medicaid and Head Start were taken offline. Nonprofits that provide services that Americans need to live their lives faced imminent peril. Science and health agencies like the National Science Foundation and Centers for Disease Control paused all action on scientific studies being done by grantees. While two court injunctions blocked the memo, some funding is still not going out.
Government workers are also facing an onslaught from Trump and Musk. After commandeering a government-wide email account at OPM, Musk offered all government employees a deferred resignation offer to quit that included payments unauthorized by Congress. At the Department of Justice, Trump fired FBI agents who led prosecutions related to his effort to steal the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection and ordered the agency to name and review thousands more FBI agents who worked on those cases for termination.
Trump has also attempted to rewrite the Constitution with his executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of people in the U.S. with and without legal status. This flies in the face of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and all legal precedent interpreting it. A federal judge blocked the implementation of this order on Wednesday.
Most of these actions are likely illegal, as experts have noted and a rising tide of lawsuits allege. Already, two federal judges have blocked Trump’s efforts to impound congressionally authorized funds through the now-rescinded OMB memo. More injunctions may be soon to come. But the anti-constitutional threat continues to push forward.
Congress, under the sniveling leadership of Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.), has surrendered its power at Trump’s feet. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse to fund the government and enact laws creating and authorizing executive branch agencies. The president is then supposed to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Trump has inverted this constitutional design with the help of a supplicant Republican-controlled Congress.
The destruction of USAID is a prime example. The foreign-aid agency was established in 1961 by Congress and then authorized as an independent agency by an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. In 1998, Congress passed a foreign aid reform law that officially established USAID as a congressionally authorized independent agency.
“It would take an act of Congress to reverse that — simply put, the president may not unilaterally override a statute by executive order,” Tess Bridgeman, co-editor of Just Security and a former national security assistant to President Barack Obama, writes.
The president can restructure USAID, but must do so only after informing and consulting with Congress, according to a Congressional Research Service report published on Feb. 3. Presidents, including Trump, had previously followed this procedure before enacting any changes. That is not what happened here. The elimination of the agency has proceeded outside of the law at the sole discretion of one man, the president.
Trump and Musk have already stated they will do the same to the Department of Education, which was expressly created as a Cabinet-level agency by Congress in 1979, next.
Some Democratic consultants and advisers make the mistake of whinging that their party shouldn’t challenge Trump’s destruction of USAID. The agency isn’t sympathetic; foreign aid is unpopular, they say. Wait until a more sympathetic target faces elimination. But this misses what has been eliminated here. It’s not just that USAID has been eliminated. Congress has been eliminated.
Congress’ effective nullification is also what Trump’s impoundments of congressionally authorized funds and refusal to honor loan contracts augurs.
Most worryingly, Musk’s seizure of the Treasury Department’s payment system gives him the unilateral power to block payments that are unaligned with Trump’s priorities. This all is antithetical to the separation of powers put forward in the Constitution.
The Constitution requires Congress to pass laws and make appropriations and for the president to execute those laws and appropriations. If Trump’s actions stand, the Constitution will have been turned inside out. Congress will be swept aside. So will the American people, who elected Congress as a co-equal power to the president.
And if Trump and Musk have their way, the judiciary will also be eliminated.
When Vance called for the “De-Ba’athification” of the U.S. government, he also opined on what would happen if the courts intervened.
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“When the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, citing an apocryphal statement attributed to the country’s seventh president.
That may already be happening, as grantees are still having trouble accessing funds even after two judges blocked the government from freezing funds under the OMB memo.
What this amounts to is one-man rule. The MAGA royalists have tossed the Constitution aside — at least provisionally — in favor of a king. Will anyone stop them?