WASHINGTON – The first month of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has been a nonstop assault on the authority of Congress as an equal branch of government, with the president asserting unprecedented control over lawmakers’ power to control spending.
While Democrats have cried foul, filing numerous lawsuits that are slowly making their way through the courts, Republicans have by and large cheered his efforts to accomplish what they’ve long failed to do through legislative means: eliminate large swaths of the federal government. On Tuesday, they’ll stand and clap for him some more when he addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time as the 47th president of the United States.
“President Trump is coming in a triumphant return to Congress to address us as the president once again, and in the first month of office, he has accomplished so much that it could fill three hours,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) gushed on Fox News on Sunday.
Trump has empowered Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to rip through federal agencies in search of “waste, fraud and abuse,” resulting in mass firings of federal workers and the wholesale dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, even though Musk and his underlings have uncovered almost zero waste, fraud or abuse. Their actions have led to widespread chaos and confusion across the government, with some critical employees later having to be rehired, and billions of dollars in foreign assistance put on hold or canceled.
The implosion of USAID, in particular, has been swift despite no congressional action on the matter. As the Congressional Research Service has explained, because it was created by Congress, “the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”
Federal courts have said the Trump administration overstepped its authority with the USAID cuts, but the Supreme Court last week paused a lower court’s order that the administration unlock foreign aid funds while the legal battle plays out.
The Trump administration has also tried to stop financial assistance grants from going out of federal agencies, and Trump last month threatened to block all federal funding in Maine if the governor refuses to cooperate with Trump’s efforts to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports. On Friday, the federal government discontinued a grant program that benefited Maine fisheries; it was unclear if similar grants to other states would be affected.
“The Trump administration has been very illegally not spending money,” Bobby Kogan, a budget policy expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, said on a press call this week. “This is the most illegal set of budgetary actions that any president in U.S. history has ever taken.”
The president’s selective approach to federal law goes beyond budgets, of course. For instance, the Treasury Department announced Sunday it wouldn’t enforce an anti-money laundering statute enacted during the Biden administration, the Justice Department dropped a corruption case against New York City’s mayor after he cozied up to Trump and also announced it would not enforce a ban on TikTok, and the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a civil case against a crypto mogul who invested in the president’s crypto company.
Trump empowered Musk by putting him in charge of a new federal initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, a title Musk contrived in order to spell DOGE, a once-popular internet meme and cryptocurrency inspired by a picture of a Shiba Inu dog. Republicans embraced the DOGE project without knowing about the meme or having any clue what Musk would do.
A few Republicans have criticized DOGE, most notably Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has complained about layoffs in her state and said Musk should “learn about the jobs he’s trying to cut.”
“If we in the legislative branch allow ourselves to be kind of rolled over or ignored … it certainly weakens us. I don’t think that that is right and that is appropriate,” Murkowski said Tuesday. “We need to look inward here. It’s not all about taking potshots at Trump or DOGE or Elon Musk. It’s about the Senate saying, no, actually, we have a role here when it comes to determining the direction of spending.”
Speaker Johnson and many other Republicans have hinted that any significant cuts to the federal budget have to come from Congress, not a bureaucrat in the White House. But they’re in no rush to get in Musk’s way.
“We’re going to need a few more weeks, maybe a month or more, to qualify and quantify and then codify what Elon Musk and the DOGE effort is all about, and that is eliminating fraud, waste and abuse in the government,” Johnson said Sunday, using the word “codify” to suggest lawmakers would write a law enacting cuts Musk has suggested.
Democrats, meanwhile, have warned that the country is on the precipice of a constitutional crisis.
“This principle of checks and balances only works if people don’t voluntarily remove their spine,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told HuffPost.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she planned to skip Trump’s speech entirely because he “is spitting in the face of the law” by freezing congressionally approved spending.
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“There are farms and small businesses across Washington state and America who are on the verge of collapse because Trump and Elon are illegally blocking federal dollars they are owed,” Murray said. “There are thousands of fired federal workers, many of them veterans, who have been carelessly laid off by Trump and Musk with no consideration for the services they provide and how that might harm millions of Americans, whether that’s VA patient safety or the timely disbursement of Social Security checks.”