Love to see HN political bot comment graph like if and when there was a surge of them over time (US elections or other countries elections). Like did the Ukraine blowing up Yandex's data center(s) have any effect?
This type of strategy is almost the only way to get rid of these kinds of agencies. You'd end up with a million raodblocks being tossed up if you tried it any other way.
Right, because there shouldn't be any roadblocks when you're taking an action that has a high probability of resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying.
We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.
Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
49.8% of people voted for "this". After he disavowed Project 2025 which was a bit of a boogeyman prospect.
But, turns out, yes, he was Mr 2025. He also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs (big promises of reproductive care access for example), or anything else. He elected himself to ally with dictators and foreign powers, to rip up and destroy the government.
We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this. And I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress, to use the FCC for jawboning, to use the DOJ as a puppet, to go after non-violent student protestors, to... It just goes on and on.
The people who did vote for this have been lied to by the Republican controlled media. The powell memorandum is real, and these people have been sold lies. It's almost a miracle that the truth is just so in the face of the lies that the propaganda lies sold to tear down and destroy the USA are going to be so evidently false that even huge swarths of red America won't be able to keep their head in the sand and slumber through another round of billionaire insurrection with the same ease they've supported it for for decades.
We don't get to just tear everything down because of one election.
GOP voters will somehow find the sex trafficking cabal in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor and Obama's illuminati connections but when asked to connect Trump to P2025 it's, "he said he hasn't read it, case closed."
> also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs
If only the 2020 money printer or the ACA "repeal and replace" that never happened could have warned us of this.
> ally with dictators and foreign powers
Kim, Putin, MBS... all his best friends/financiers before 2024.
> We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this.
They either voted for this or they can't be bothered to use recent memory to inform their voting decisions.
> I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress...
For some, he's exactly the president to land these questions in front of the Supreme Court, whose majority loves unitary executive and hates stare decisis. For others, he's allowed to try without consequence because SCOTUS declared presidential actions to have absolute immunity.
But that is exactly what happened. He ran on deportations, ending the war in Ukraine, and Project 2025. He explicitly said he was going to do as much as possible through executive action. SCOTUS has already shown its deference to him.
And the American people elected Trump and gave him both houses. There is very, little that can be done until his term is up. Norms mean nothing when you re-elect the guy famous for creating the world of alternative facts.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
This article isn't about that, though? USAID was never designated as an independent agency. But it was a statutory agency, which means that the President was required to run it according to its statutory structure.
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
> Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws
The impoundment control act specifically provides for Congress to resend previously appropriate spending if the president doesn’t want to spend it. nothing in the empowerment control act that clearly prevents the president from freezing spending for a short period within a single given budget year before asking Congress to resend particular appropriations.
The USAID budget in 2024 was almost $35 billion annually. If you search the budget bill for amounts “apportioned to” USAID, you will not find $35 billion of annual budget authority specifically to USAID. Much of USAID’s funding is appropriated to the President and apportioned to State. State has broad powers to transfer the funds: https://uscode.house.gov/us/usc/119-134/t22/s2675/
There is a complex web of statues and regulations that applies to the state department specifically. There is a reason these lawsuits have not gone anywhere.
It is pretty clear what the goal was here: to do an end run around spending money that was already appropriately earmarked. You can twist and turn all you want but that's what it was and no amount of seeking justification after the fact is going to change that.
The problem is that if you see everything through the twin lenses of paper and power that you risk losing your humanity. USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close. Seeing it shut down killed people, pure and simple, and whether that may have not been the goal (it may well have been the goal, I do not know) the outcome is the same.
Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering makes for an interesting test in character, morals and ultimately in actual justice.
And therein lies the reason why these lawsuits have not gone anywhere. But nobody's fooled. Well, ok, maybe you are.
> USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close.
There was a time when it did that, yes. But it began as a State Department front to interfere in the politics of third world countries and ultimately returned to such activities. There's a reason Mexico's President, who hates Trump, supported shutting it down: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu... ("During a press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for shutting down USAID, criticizing the agency's role in funding organizations she described as working against Mexican interests.").
I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
> Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering
I've been on HN since the Obama administration, and you won't find a single post from me defending federal bureaucratic privilege under any administration. I simply do not believe that the bureaucracy is a branch of government in and of itself. The federal bureaucracy is not in our constitution--it is a European import from admirers of the Prussian bureaucracy: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-german-stamp-on-wilsons-a....
> I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
Is there anything that you won't twist to justify your hero's actions?
Elections certainly have consequences, and I wish acting outside constitutional scope had consequences, too. (maybe this specific issue is within scope or there is a reasonable question about it, but so many other issues seem unreasonably out of scope, IMHO)
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
There was a recession bill passed in 2025 July 2025 for already appropriated monies.
Moreover, the impoundment rules don’t require congress to act first before the president acts. They require the money to be spent, but if the budgetary authority is provided over a year it’s hard to say when the president must spend that money within the year. (Unless there’s specific requirements in the statute.)
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
But again DOGE acted before that was in place. All I’m saying is I expect a future DOJ to find legal grounds for going ofter those involved for exceeding their authority.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
So, per your interpretation, the president can just ignore any law created by Congress by simply allocating zero funds to any agency carrying out the law?
USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.
So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
Not at all. The founders were focused on having a vigorous executive who could “just do things.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The system they created is not based on the premise of cautious bureaucracy. It was based on having frequent elections that would empower a vigorous president and political appointees to carry out what they had campaigned on.
The founders were men of action. They would be horrified by how our government today is run by lawyers through APA litigation. The HR-ification of the American government is a mid-20th century invention.
> The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.
That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.
That’s just how litigation works. If the issue comes down to the payment of money, courts assume that it can be sorted out eventually by ordering money to be paid or returned. The government can destroy your business with an illegal regulation, and they don’t have to ask courts for permission first. I’m such cases, you probably won’t even get money back from the government. It would be bizarre to impose a higher standard of oversight for the government to restructure its own operations than for the government to regulate private conduct.
The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.
That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.
Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
That's how it should be. But they counted on the courts being slower to catch up with stuff than that they could destroy it and by and large that proved to be correct. The checks and balances in the USA are not prepared to deal with people at this level of power that are as malicious as this. The founders more or less left that as an exercise for the future to figure out and may have presaged such a thing happening in some of their writings.
> Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
Yes, but the paperwork that decides who is the President or his appointee’s lawful agent is different than the civil service paperwork for employment. Lewin was appointed as an SGE. This article is about the HR details of his internal transfer into USAID. But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
> If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
Yes. But if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide and hadn’t done all his paperwork yet, would that be illegal? And also, doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights. Very different from a doing an internal reorganization within a department. If a CEO pulls in someone from one department to clean house in another department, how much HR paperwork do you really need?
I think appointing people who absolutely should not be doing the jobs they are appointed to is a way of sidestepping all law. They want to destroy all government and what better way to do it than through sheer incompetence with a layer of plausible deniability.
I guess your point of view makes sense if you think of “government” as some self-sustaining organism where voting is supposed to nudge the ship but can’t steer it. Fortunately, that isn’t the government the founders created.
The Administrator of USAID is a presidentially appointed and senate confirmed position. Under the Vacancies Reform Act the President can appoint another Senate confirmed official from anywhere else in the government to fill that spot for up to 210 days. Trump appointed Rubio to that role.
An acting administrator or agency head can then generally “detail” an employee from anywhere else in the government to serve as a deputy in a temporary basis, which Rubio did here. Agency heads generally have broad discretion to hire their deputies.
But he was elected, which qualifies him. The voters voted for this sort of thing. Not in the exact details, but that's why it's a representative democracy instead of a direct one.
The fact that it was called a "Department" when it wasn't even technically a department makes me think Congress didn't authorize anything, and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
The country is run by literal 90-year-olds deferring to whoever is against the other party.
> ... and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.
^^^ This right here. In nearly every other job, you refuse to do your job (or worse yet, do the opposite of your job while "on the clock" at work), you're pretty much instantly fired, and sometimes (depending on the severity of your violation) you're even prosecuted.
I worked as a contractor for USAID. A lot of the people that worked there were spies. They shut it down because they weren't 'their' spies. Some people voted in the president to dismantle the deep state, and he did, but he just replaced them with the deeper state who probably eat children.
Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.
If he actually gives up power in 2029 I'm pretty sure he'll do a mass pardon. But since presidents aren't supposed to pardon themselves I wouldn't be surprised if it can be struck down.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, they could simply decide that those things that trump did weren't legal including his pardons. Sure, there will be a lot of pushback but if nothing is done against this kind of behavior you can set your watch for the next installment of fascism light.
I'd like to see them all rounded up and put in prison indefinitely. Denied bail and left there while their crimes are documented. Everybody connected to DOGE should be in prison, all the way up to Elon.
There's something about the trick of abusing a process set up to hire temporary staff quickly for overseas disasters and pandemics to take over and destroy a government department you don't like that feels LLM-like to me.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
It will be interesting to see whether in the next Admin/Congress , if Democrat, will investigate and declare these actions unlawful (done without Congressional approval) and whether a new DOJ will investigate the individuals like this DOGE dude as having broken the law for operating outside their authority because the proper procedures weren’t followed. It’s going to be interesting to see whether/who winds up in jail.
DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency. Also focusing on where majority of spending occurs where we could get biggest bang for the improved efficiency. After this good luck selling someone on another round of efficiency improvements.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
There is a book about DOGE, "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State" by Michael Lewis. In a recent interview he said, that after researching DOGE and its actions he believes something similar what you said, that DOGE was only a smoke screen or distraction for a larger transfer of executive power.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
lawn | 15 hours ago
stefap2 | 12 hours ago
LorenPechtel | 9 hours ago
imzadi | 15 hours ago
iugtmkbdfil834 | 14 hours ago
Catloafdev | 14 hours ago
paul7986 | 15 hours ago
cowlevel | 15 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 13 hours ago
HN doesn't have the kind of filters that the big social media platforms do, either.
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
paul7986 | 11 hours ago
pjc50 | 9 hours ago
seany | 14 hours ago
eppp | 14 hours ago
malfist | 14 hours ago
alsetmusic | 14 hours ago
analognoise | 14 hours ago
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
Arwill | 14 hours ago
DaSHacka | 13 hours ago
I know their tendancy to have wiring faults could certainly stand to be improved but jeez, that's a bit harsh
LorenPechtel | 9 hours ago
pjc50 | 9 hours ago
binarymax | 14 hours ago
woah | 14 hours ago
seanhunter | 14 hours ago
eppp | 14 hours ago
broken-kebab | 14 hours ago
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
helterskelter2 | 14 hours ago
zzrrt | 14 hours ago
When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.
aaronblohowiak | 14 hours ago
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
jauntywundrkind | 14 hours ago
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
madaxe_again | 14 hours ago
Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.
It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 9 hours ago
49.8% of people voted for "this". After he disavowed Project 2025 which was a bit of a boogeyman prospect.
But, turns out, yes, he was Mr 2025. He also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs (big promises of reproductive care access for example), or anything else. He elected himself to ally with dictators and foreign powers, to rip up and destroy the government.
We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this. And I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress, to use the FCC for jawboning, to use the DOJ as a puppet, to go after non-violent student protestors, to... It just goes on and on.
The people who did vote for this have been lied to by the Republican controlled media. The powell memorandum is real, and these people have been sold lies. It's almost a miracle that the truth is just so in the face of the lies that the propaganda lies sold to tear down and destroy the USA are going to be so evidently false that even huge swarths of red America won't be able to keep their head in the sand and slumber through another round of billionaire insurrection with the same ease they've supported it for for decades.
We don't get to just tear everything down because of one election.
cosmicgadget | 4 hours ago
GOP voters will somehow find the sex trafficking cabal in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor and Obama's illuminati connections but when asked to connect Trump to P2025 it's, "he said he hasn't read it, case closed."
> also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs
If only the 2020 money printer or the ACA "repeal and replace" that never happened could have warned us of this.
> ally with dictators and foreign powers
Kim, Putin, MBS... all his best friends/financiers before 2024.
> We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this.
They either voted for this or they can't be bothered to use recent memory to inform their voting decisions.
> I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress...
For some, he's exactly the president to land these questions in front of the Supreme Court, whose majority loves unitary executive and hates stare decisis. For others, he's allowed to try without consequence because SCOTUS declared presidential actions to have absolute immunity.
cosmicgadget | 4 hours ago
And the American people elected Trump and gave him both houses. There is very, little that can be done until his term is up. Norms mean nothing when you re-elect the guy famous for creating the world of alternative facts.
fabian2k | 14 hours ago
estearum | 13 hours ago
rayiner | 13 hours ago
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261784#50265886
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
rayiner | 12 hours ago
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
SpicyLemonZest | 7 hours ago
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
rayiner | 7 hours ago
> I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
You’re right that this doesn’t have to do with the unitary executive. That’s my point. It’s about things like the impoundment control act.
jeremyjh | 14 hours ago
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
rayiner | 13 hours ago
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
[1] - http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF
[2] - https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/Division%20F%2...
rayiner | 11 hours ago
And for 2026 the appropriations bills allocated the money directly to the state department.
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
rayiner | 9 hours ago
The impoundment control act specifically provides for Congress to resend previously appropriate spending if the president doesn’t want to spend it. nothing in the empowerment control act that clearly prevents the president from freezing spending for a short period within a single given budget year before asking Congress to resend particular appropriations.
bosshawg | 8 hours ago
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
rayiner | 6 hours ago
jacquesm | 6 hours ago
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/u-s-foreign-aid-fre...
rayiner | 5 hours ago
The USAID budget in 2024 was almost $35 billion annually. If you search the budget bill for amounts “apportioned to” USAID, you will not find $35 billion of annual budget authority specifically to USAID. Much of USAID’s funding is appropriated to the President and apportioned to State. State has broad powers to transfer the funds: https://uscode.house.gov/us/usc/119-134/t22/s2675/
There is a complex web of statues and regulations that applies to the state department specifically. There is a reason these lawsuits have not gone anywhere.
jacquesm | 5 hours ago
The problem is that if you see everything through the twin lenses of paper and power that you risk losing your humanity. USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close. Seeing it shut down killed people, pure and simple, and whether that may have not been the goal (it may well have been the goal, I do not know) the outcome is the same.
Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering makes for an interesting test in character, morals and ultimately in actual justice.
And therein lies the reason why these lawsuits have not gone anywhere. But nobody's fooled. Well, ok, maybe you are.
rayiner | 2 hours ago
Yes, that was the goal. But the statute expressly allows for that goal: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11374.
> USAID, if anything, did plenty of good. I've seen it up close.
There was a time when it did that, yes. But it began as a State Department front to interfere in the politics of third world countries and ultimately returned to such activities. There's a reason Mexico's President, who hates Trump, supported shutting it down: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu... ("During a press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for shutting down USAID, criticizing the agency's role in funding organizations she described as working against Mexican interests.").
I'm deeply familiar with USAID. My dad worked for USAID contractors and my family came to the U.S. on an H1 visa from such a job. USAID did some great projects in Bangladesh. But it probably killed more people in the long run through political interference than it helped. USAID was one of the last bastions of Anglo-Protestants in the US, along with the CIA. Extremely upright, orderly, admirable people. I'd love to live in a country run entirely by USAID people. But, like the CIA, they deeply misunderstand third world people. Their Puritan universalism made them completely blind to the unique political requirements of the third world. And that caused major problems whenever they became involved in "democracy promotion" (i.e. political interference).
> Creative interpretation of the rules and using judges bought and paid for and installed on dubious grounds as ways to force through things that in any other administration would have you hollering
I've been on HN since the Obama administration, and you won't find a single post from me defending federal bureaucratic privilege under any administration. I simply do not believe that the bureaucracy is a branch of government in and of itself. The federal bureaucracy is not in our constitution--it is a European import from admirers of the Prussian bureaucracy: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-german-stamp-on-wilsons-a....
jacquesm | 11 minutes ago
Is there anything that you won't twist to justify your hero's actions?
The hypocrisy on display here is off the scale.
toast0 | 13 hours ago
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
jacquesm | 6 hours ago
rayiner | 13 hours ago
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
insane_dreamer | 13 hours ago
rayiner | 13 hours ago
USAID still exists on paper. But under the current appropriations bills, the funding is allocated to the State Department.
lesuorac | 12 hours ago
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...
rayiner | 12 hours ago
paulryanrogers | 7 hours ago
rayiner | 3 hours ago
Moreover, the impoundment rules don’t require congress to act first before the president acts. They require the money to be spent, but if the budgetary authority is provided over a year it’s hard to say when the president must spend that money within the year. (Unless there’s specific requirements in the statute.)
insane_dreamer | 11 hours ago
rayiner | 11 hours ago
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
jeremyjh | 11 hours ago
insane_dreamer | 7 hours ago
nullocator | 12 hours ago
rayiner | 12 hours ago
khriss | 3 hours ago
USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.
So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?
hvb2 | 11 hours ago
It's not even established that he has the power. The fact that they do something doesn't mean they have that power.
And given that, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore all other rules.
> You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no?
rayiner | 11 hours ago
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
hvb2 | 10 hours ago
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
tacitusarc | 10 hours ago
I do not believe this is true historically
rayiner | 6 hours ago
Not at all. The founders were focused on having a vigorous executive who could “just do things.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The system they created is not based on the premise of cautious bureaucracy. It was based on having frequent elections that would empower a vigorous president and political appointees to carry out what they had campaigned on.
The founders were men of action. They would be horrified by how our government today is run by lawyers through APA litigation. The HR-ification of the American government is a mid-20th century invention.
khriss | 3 hours ago
100%, just not in the direction you think. They would be apalled at Trump's blatant, in your face corruption all while the MAGA base cheers him on.
xg15 | 7 hours ago
I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.
That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.
rayiner | 6 hours ago
The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.
eszed | 4 hours ago
Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.
hackingonempty | 15 minutes ago
It's like byzantine faults, no system can protect you if you don't have some minimum of correctly functioning legislators, judges, and executives.
zzrrt | 10 hours ago
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
jacquesm | 6 hours ago
rayiner | 4 hours ago
Yes, but the paperwork that decides who is the President or his appointee’s lawful agent is different than the civil service paperwork for employment. Lewin was appointed as an SGE. This article is about the HR details of his internal transfer into USAID. But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
> If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
Yes. But if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide and hadn’t done all his paperwork yet, would that be illegal? And also, doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights. Very different from a doing an internal reorganization within a department. If a CEO pulls in someone from one department to clean house in another department, how much HR paperwork do you really need?
secretsatan | 9 hours ago
There are other theories of course.
rayiner | 4 hours ago
maxerickson | 5 hours ago
If he ordered a dog to dismantle USAID, would the ineffectiveness of that simply be due to the dog being incompetent and not be legally challengeable?
rayiner | 4 hours ago
An acting administrator or agency head can then generally “detail” an employee from anywhere else in the government to serve as a deputy in a temporary basis, which Rubio did here. Agency heads generally have broad discretion to hire their deputies.
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
lesuorac | 12 hours ago
But also the voters voted for Trump to execute the laws passed by Congress. Which law said get rid of USAID?
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
lesuorac | 9 hours ago
He won at a time where the incumbent bias was like -10. He won the same reason Biden won in 2020; by not being the guy in charge.
esalman | 12 hours ago
iAMkenough | 8 hours ago
The country is run by literal 90-year-olds deferring to whoever is against the other party.
blooalien | 5 hours ago
^^^ This right here. In nearly every other job, you refuse to do your job (or worse yet, do the opposite of your job while "on the clock" at work), you're pretty much instantly fired, and sometimes (depending on the severity of your violation) you're even prosecuted.
rayiner | 12 hours ago
USAID still exists on paper, but Congress hasn’t appropriated any funding for it.
morninglight | 8 hours ago
https://youtu.be/zhsmHxo0nvE
afpx | 7 hours ago
labrador | 14 hours ago
tombert | 14 hours ago
LorenPechtel | 9 hours ago
jacquesm | 6 hours ago
khriss | 14 hours ago
If the GOP loses big in the midterms, we might finally see MAGA and the GOP turn on each other in an internecine frenzy.
red-iron-pine | 14 hours ago
they are, in all likelihood, foreign agents or acting on behalf of them.
sys_64738 | 12 hours ago
matt-attack | 3 hours ago
jwineinger | 12 hours ago
rasz | 11 hours ago
krapp | 8 hours ago
You misspelled "complicit."
cosmicgadget | 3 hours ago
BobaFloutist | 8 hours ago
podgorniy | 14 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 13 hours ago
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
vrganj | 13 hours ago
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=proj...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
matt-attack | 3 hours ago
insane_dreamer | 13 hours ago
stefap2 | 12 hours ago
esalman | 12 hours ago
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
insane_dreamer | 11 hours ago
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
stefap2 | 9 hours ago
Epa095 | 10 hours ago
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
Chesterton's Fence is no joke.
LorenPechtel | 9 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 11 hours ago
moribvndvs | 9 hours ago