Is Trump’s Dept. of Government Efficiency Creating a Constitutional Crisis?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, earlier in the program, we discussed the acts that Elon Musk has been taking to critical agencies in a way that many believe could be unconstitutional and even illegal. In a new piece for The Atlantic, journalist Jonathan Chait warns that it is urgent for the legislature to reclaim its power before it’s too late. And he tells Michel Martin why too late could come a lot sooner than everyone thinks.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Jonathan Chait, thank you so much for speaking with us.

JONATHAN CHAIT, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Thank you.

MARTIN: I want to talk about a couple of recent articles that you’ve written for The Atlantic, but I want to start with one where you say that the constitutional crisis is here. In plain language, what are the things that lead you to that conclusion?

CHAIT: Well, the Constitution’s Article 1 gives Congress power over spending, and that’s the system that we’ve had in this country for the entire existence of this republic. If Congress establishes an agency or a spending program, that is the law, and the president has to follow the law. Now, there have been disagreements about how the president handles that and in the priorities, but that basic fact has not been challenged. And that fact is what the Trump administration is now challenging. They are claiming for themselves the right to eliminate any program or any agency that they don’t like for any reason whatsoever. So, that is totally new, and that would completely upend the balance of power between the branches of government.

MARTIN: Do you think that the public sees it as seriously as you do?

CHAIT: No, I don’t. Although, you are seeing some evidence that President Trump’s approval ratings are falling back a bit, even just over the past couple of weeks. And you’ve seen that Elon Musk has grown unpopular. So, I think the general idea that the administration is doing something radical and moving really fast is getting through to the public. And it’s common for presidents to come in and think the public wants them to undertake radical change, this is a mistake that presidents of both parties have made. And assume that the public will reward them for moving things really fast. And that’s usually not the case. And this seems to be another instance in which that same mistake has been made.

MARTIN: So, what are some of the moves that the president, you know, with Elon Musk in the lead, this tech mogul, richest man in the world, what are some of the decisions that they’ve taken that have caused this kind of alarm? Describe what’s going on here.

CHAIT: Yes. Well, they put out this very broad and confusing memo that seemed to just suspend the entire federal government’s operations, which threw lots of people justifiably into a panic before a court sort of slapped them down. But now, they’re trying to do a version of that seemingly piecemeal. You’ve got Musk holed up in the Eisenhower building next to the White House just kind of going through the federal budget and without having much expertise to do this job, determining which programs he considers wasteful or fraudulent or part of some kind of left-wing conspiracy that he imagines has been going on for years and trying to just zero out those programs or declare them dead. And then, meanwhile, they’re sending out letters to the whole federal workforce, urging them to retire immediately. And some people are figuring out whether they should take that offer, or whether it is an offer at all, or whether it’s even legal. And all these things are very hard to determine. So, they’re just throwing sand into the gears of the machine, or they’re just jamming up the machine as hard and fast as they can without having a very close idea of how it operates and what the effects of all this might be on the people who are relying on these government services.

MARTIN: One of the things that has really set off red flags for a lot of people is that Musk and this group of young software engineers, apparently some of them — you know, we’re told that one of them is as young as 19 years old, most of them are in their early 20s, have had access to the Treasury system for dispersing government funds.

CHAIT: Right.

MARTIN: And this has heretofore been supervised by career employees. The career employee who was in charge of this was retired under duress, it seems, after he objected to them having access to this. Now, as we are speaking now, a federal judge has said they can only have limited access, only two members of this team can have limited access. It’s so-called read only access. Would you just talk about, like, why this is so concerning?

CHAIT: I don’t think anybody knows exactly what they’re doing, and that’s part of the reason for the concern. We do know, though, that they’ve misled the public about this. They said that Musk only had read only access to this information, but reporters found that they didn’t. They actually had access to go in and change the outcomes of these payments. So, what people think, although, you know, I don’t want to just pass on this speculation as fact, but it seems as if Musk is inclined to use this tool to advance this antigovernment agenda that he set out for himself, that basically, instead of going to Congress and saying, we think this program is too big or this agency should be shuttered, they’re just going to unilaterally cut off the payments to whatever programs that they think shouldn’t exist, just going straight to the end point. And so, that would accomplish his work immediately. And even if the courts were to step in and say, you can’t do this, the damage of moves like this would be so difficult to reverse that they might functionally succeed in their goal, even if it’s illegal.

MARTIN: President Trump and his kind of designated agent in this, Elon Musk, have been arguing that these programs are either inefficient or, in their words, corrupt. What do you say to that?

CHAIT: Look, there are inefficient programs in the federal government, and there are certainly inefficient systems that prevent the government from functioning efficiently. And I know of some policy wonks who have been writing about this and trying to make the government work better. It’s very frustrating that they’re not listening to people like that who have real expertise and actually want to make the government more cost effective and more efficient. And instead, seem to be just running rampant through the government, picking out programs that have names that sound weird to them, or which they just make — see the pants guesses are doing something bad or something progressive and just zero them out with any real thought. So, it’s frustrating as someone who wants to make government more efficient that they’re not doing this in any kind of careful or respectable way.

MARTIN: Before we move on to the constitutional crisis aspect, because that is your larger point, that this isn’t just about an overreach in one area by a person who is inexperienced, doesn’t really know how the government works, what it does, is that he seems particularly fixated on USAID, which distributes humanitarian aid. The president and Elon Musk seem particularly fixated on this, to the point of using some very disparaging language to talk about the people who do this work and the work that they’re doing. Why are they so fixated on these agencies? Do you have any — this particular agency, do you have any sense of that?

CHAIT: That’s a great question, and I’ve tried to figure it out. It’s one irony, and I’m actually working on a story about this, is that the Marxist left hates USAID, has always hated USAID. And the reason they hate it is that it is a tool of American foreign policy, and as such, it was designed to counter the effects of communism, now counters the effects of the Chinese Communist Party globally. By providing humanitarian aid throughout the online world, it tries to show the world that the United States cares about them. So, it’s a kind of joint diplomatic humanitarian mission. So, describing it as Marxist is really an inversion of the truth. Now, why they came to this, as you say, is very, very hard to understand. If you wanted to give them credit for being clever, you’d say the American public doesn’t like foreign aid. The American public massively overestimates the amount of the budget that goes to foreign aid. So, one reason people don’t like foreign aid is because they think we’re spending far more on it than we are. But it is a soft target. And if they want to establish the principle that the White House has the right to terminate any federal program that it wants without going through Congress, you want to start with the softest target to begin with. And then you’ve established the principle and you can start going after harder targets. And that would really enable conservatives to advance policy goals that they’ve always wanted to do, right? You’ve got large chunks of the conservative movement that have opposed the expansions of government that have taken place since the New Deal and the Great Society, but considered a lot of these large spending programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, to be popular and difficult to cut or to privatize. But if they could just do it at the White House with the snap of the fingers and not have to have a vote in Congress, not to have public accountability, that would be a generational change in the structure of government and advance a lot of their goals.

MARTIN: One of the arguments that you make in your piece is that, look, if this is a constitutional crisis, this speaks to a neutering of the third branch of government, which is the Congress, then presumably everybody in Congress should be concerned.

CHAIT: Well, the first branch of government, I think, is that the founders decided to be the first branch. Congress is supposed to preempt this.

MARTIN: The first branch. But the question I have for you is, why are they not more jealous of their own institutional imperatives?

CHAIT: Well, right. What you’ve identified is really a longstanding flaw in the Constitution, and neither of us is the first person to identify this, but the founders weren’t thinking about political parties when they designed the system. Parliamentary forms of government are designed with parties in mind. You have party control as in the core of how those systems are supposed to operate. But what the American constitution designed was they imagined that these separate branches would operate as branches independently of each other, right? So, that they would be jealous of their powers and make sure the other branches didn’t impinge upon their control. So, you would have Congress making sure the president didn’t take too much power because Congress would want to make sure the Congress is strong, and the president would do the same thing vis-a-vis Congress and the executive branch and the legislature and the judicial branch would all check each other. But parties upend those incentive systems, right? When you’ve got Congress and the president controlled by the same party, members of Congress just want the president to succeed. Now, that’s a longstanding feature of American politics, but it’s kind of risen to a new height under the Republican Party, because Donald Trump has so much power over other Republicans. The Republican Party has come to define its ideology almost entirely in whatever terms Donald Trump sets. And Trump has shown that he can just change what the party stands for overnight and most Republicans will follow him instantaneously. He’s also shown that any Republicans who defy him, he can say that they’re a rhino or Republican in name only and in support of a primary challenge against them and probably end their political career.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk about the Democrats now, because you’ve also been writing about them.

CHAIT: Yes.

MARTIN: You’re not impressed.

CHAIT: No.

MARTIN: You’re not impressed? Say more.

CHAIT: Well, I wrote a piece about the Democratic National Committee’s recent meeting where they elevated their leader and sort of had a bit of a discussion about what’s happened in the past and where they want to go. And you’ve got to be a little bit careful talking about a meeting like this, because the Democratic National Committee sounds like it would be in charge of the Democrats, but it’s really an organization that has relatively limited power. If you’re a Democrat running for office, you don’t have to go to the Democratic National Committee to find out what to say or who’s going to be the candidate in your district, whether that’s determined by voters. But I think you can’t just stop there because the reason — or at least one reason the DNC is so powerless is that a lot of the power over the Democratic Party has been ceded to the progressive movement infrastructure over the past 15, 20 years. Progressive activist groups financed privately by donors, often very liberal donors, have advanced a series of causes and, you know, environmental justice, reproductive justice, and racial justice. And all those activists have set out to push the party to the left since the second Obama term and they’ve had tremendous amounts of success in pushing them to the left. But I think in a lot of ways, they pushed the party to the left of where the public is and where they were winning during the Obama era and have had some responsibility for the defeats of the last election. And what I noticed in the DNC meetings is there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgement of this problem. They just seem to be doubling down on the same buzzwords in the same analysis that got them into the problem in the first place.

MARTIN: So, so what about members of Congress? I mean, they have — again, some of them have been in office for a long time. They have their own standing in their communities. They have their own reputations. So, you know, what’s the — I mean, where is the leadership there? I mean, it’s the simple problem here that there is no figure who commands the respect of — or at least the followership of sufficient numbers of even members of Congress to kind of create a — I don’t know any other word to use, although it’s become kind of a —

CHAIT: Opposition.

MARTIN: — a buzzword, a resistance.

CHAIT: Yes. Yes.

MARTIN: Is that is that the issue? Is it a failure of sort of the leadership personalities?

CHAIT: Well, look, I think we should be a little bit patient in assessing the situation. I think it’s a very common problem for a party that shut out of power to lack effective voice and effective leaders because they just don’t have a power base from which to operate in. And usually when parties come back, it’s not because of the ideas that they’re developing in opposition or the charisma of the leaders they have in opposition, it’s because the ruling party, the governing party overreaches and creates a backlash and then the opposition party finds ways to exploit that backlash. I think whatever leaders the Democratic Party develops are going to come out of the presidential primary, that that’s going to begin in three years or so, and they’re going to figure out whatever issues resonate most with the public, whatever failures of this administration they can run against and craft a message. But my concern is that while they position themselves to do that, they recognize that they can also take on a bunch of positions that are too far to the left of where the public is that’ll make it impossible for them to take advantage of public discontent with Trump.

MARTIN: And, Chait, before we let you go, the courts. I mean, so far the courts have been — have confronted Trump and his agenda at multiple points. I mean, they’ve already said a federal — one federal judge has said, look, this idea of eliminating, you know, birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment is overreach. But there is another argument to suggest that that’s his goal, is to get some of these issues in court because he does believe — he appointed three of the current Supreme Court justices. They have demonstrated that they have a maximalist view of executive power. Is there any effective check on the actions of this president?

CHAIT: Well, you’re certainly right that that’s one — they have basically two routes by which this can work. One is that they just get these cases to court and they win. And they change the precedent and they get the court to say actually the executive branch can just unilaterally eliminate any spending program it doesn’t like. Now, that seems to violate the plain text of the Constitution and the way it’s been understood for over 200 years. But the Constitution is whatever the five most conservative justices say it is. So, if that’s what they say it is, that’s what it is. Secondly, it’s possible that they’re going to lose, but they’ll move so fast that they’ll have an effect anyway. That once you drive out the staff, the expertise, the institutional knowledge in a lot of these agencies because they can’t sit around waiting forever to see if they win in court. They’ve got to go on their lives. They’ve got mortgages to pay. They’ve got, you know, things to do with their lives. You won’t be able to rebuild it. So, I think that the second danger is probably more sears than the first, but either one is a possibility.

MARTIN: Jonathan Chait, thank you so much for talking with us.

CHAIT: Thank you.