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Comment by zosima | Hacker News Reader

DOGE gets its authority through the president. The president definitely has the authority to audit and/or stop illegal, fraudulent or just wasteful transactions.

The exact shape or form of USAID is also up to the president. It was created through an executive order, and can of course also be transformed through one.

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It was consolidated into the Department of State as part of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 as an agency with an administrator and responsibility for administrating the distribution of aid under certain preexisting laws. So it is straightforwardly outside of the authority of the president to disband the agency, as Congress has provided that it shall exist. And it is likewise outside of the authority of the president to reduce it to an inactive status, as it has certain Congressionally-established responsibilities that it must perform.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title22/cha...

I didn't say the president could disband it. I said the president could transform it.

The comment you replied to was discussing the president’s authority to shut down agencies. (And lack thereof.)

I have seen this regurgitated several times on this site now. This is blatantly false, congress passed a law in 1998 to establish USAID. The EO was made with authority that had been granted by another law. That law does not allow the President to abolish it:

> Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization plan submitted under section 6601 of this title, and except as provided in section 6562 of this title, there is within the Executive branch of Government the United States Agency for International Development as an entity described in section 104 of title 5.

- 22 U.S.C. §6563

All it takes is a simple google search.

The actual law is a high dimensional interaction of all active legislation. Predicting what the legal system will do is hard and often cannot be achieved with high reliability with a google search.

This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield useful prediction making capability.

Also malicious compliance is an option. Maybe they could name a single person the official administrator, given them an office in a basement and officially comply, while effectively shutting everything down. The extent to which fulfilling the intent of legislation vs relying on the discretion of the executive to interpret it within, and as a matter of precedent deferring to executive discretion by default in court cases, probably enables many more abuses than have been contemplated prior to this presidency.

Unless they are paying that person in the basement the full funding of what Congress has budgetted for USAID that's Impoundment. If they are then it's still Impoundment because it's been redirected from it's original purpose.

The OP asserted that USAID was created by EO and that the president is free to do what he wants with it. That statement is blatantly false. How does court decide is not relevant to this discussion, because as you said it is speculative.

> The president definitely has the authority to audit and/or stop illegal, fraudulent or just wasteful transactions.

This is not true. Obviously.

That would give the President carte blanche authority over the budget by merely declaring "illegal/fraudulent/wasteful."

Go re-read the Constitution before posting this bullshit.

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