and it's looking like a legit CONSTITUTIONAL crisis.
Its in the first article of the constitution.
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
Yes he is.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
Which is stupid because you Uncle Orange has access to the spending records.
Man, March is going to be bloody.
For now, they are just pausing payments.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
I can think of 8 or 9 figures why he wouldn't.
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
He might be due to SpaceX government contracts.
Edit: someone linked below confirmation he does have top secret clearance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42942848
It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.
EDIT: I was mistaken, please look up Impoundment of appropriated funds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5281438/understanding-t...
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/10/bidens-border-wall-explain...
Biden tried to get congress to re-appropriate the funds. They wouldn't, so he spent it as he was obligated.
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
America is no longer a nation of laws. Period. We are a nation ruled by Trump and Musk.
We are in fact a nation of laws and we ought to demand enforcement.
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.