I find it wild that apparently there is no law onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests. Is it all just based on conventions, goodwill and culture?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu... Sec. 7
[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1140091792251...
By my reading, this is a clarification that if an agency makes a significant policy change or regulation, they ought to run it by the president first.
It doesn't preclude other branches of government from checking this power.
They're also responsible liable for keeping the data safe, which has already been broken at least once:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052432
Possibly violating:
> Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information— […]
> continually identifies, reviews, and discusses areas of weakness and vulnerability in Federal programs and operations with respect to fraud, waste, and abuse;
> develops plans for coordinated, Government wide activities that address these problems and promote economy and efficiency in Federal programs and operations, including interagency and inter-entity audit, investigation, inspection, and evaluation programs and projects to deal efficiently and effectively with those problems concerning fraud and waste that exceed the capability or jurisdiction of an individual agency or entity;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...
That's as valid of a reason as you can get in the executive branch.
There is no "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The President and agency directory have authorized and ordered it. Career bureaucrats are not legally required to resist their bosses because they disagree with them.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/memo...
If the President himself breaks the law, he argues that it was in the course of his official duties [1].
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
Of course, in practical terms "in the field" this is obviously not the case. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was Elon's ego that triggered this: that at the end of the day needing a pardon would be an insult and would bruise his ego so he wants to prevent any pathway for him to be charged with a crime. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if the Doge "interns" would need one regardless.
Musk is stealing the spotlight. At the appropriate time, Trump can fire him and blame him for overstepping his bounds—I have already seen this talking point privately from GOP operatives. They’ll both have gotten what they wanted, and we’ll all be stuck footing the bill.
Trump will get his unchallenged power like Xi or Mao did.
For federal laws, yes.
If you can find a state-level law that's been violated then he has no jurisdiction to pardeon.
Trump himself was charged at the state level twice (and already convicted once):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_election_racketeering_...
See also the civil case against him for rape:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T...
Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?
I think such a body (which exists in some system) would obviously be nice right now, but I am a lot less convinced that it would be a net positive in general.
If we want to find our way out of this, I suspect a lot of people are going to need to feel directly harmed by this administration, and are going to need to basically erect a strong protest culture out of whole cloth. Something like 5% of the population in the streets can topple an authoritarian regime in the right circumstances, but not the 0.5% we might expect for a "large" protest.
“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”
James Madison
I don't say such lightly. I genuinely believe that up until very recently, all portents of doom aside, none of the prior elected presidents truly threatened the Republic. Not Bush, not Obama, none of them.
Trump has been the exception. It the electoral college had been working as intended when it was envisioned by the Founders, it would have said "Yeah, I hear you want Trump, but, no." and voted in someone who might be better suited to implement his (rough) ideas.
I'm not completely onboard with the notion of abolishing said college just yet, as I believe that the electoral system prevents a candidate from say, simply winning all of the urban areas, or exploiting some similar demographic divide that would could exist in a pure popular vote system. We're a union of states, not a single monolithic country. And while I might place my bets on a popular vote providing me the results I'd like a majority of the time, I believe broad representation that at least aids towards unity is better than an outright majority. We strive to avoid "tyranny of the majority".
I don't have any easy or simple answers as to what might fix all of this. It may not even be something our "system" can fix, but rather just a lesson we as a country have to learn. Let's hope it's not as painful as prior instances.
What about simply winning all of the rural areas? Cause that's literally what happened.
There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head. The institutions aren't anti-democratic - they were put together by democratic processes, and each speedbump is usually there for a reason. Sometimes a long-forgotten or no longer good reason, and it needs to be dismantled, also by the same type of processes that put it there. Yes, I want people who won't be easily and summarily dismissed for following the law and regulations even when they're not popular. I want regulations and guardrails that can't just be swept aside by an administration that rotates out every four to eight years. (I'm generalizing a lot here, of course...)
*Really much less than 51%, given that a large percentage of the population doesn't vote, another percentage of the population's vote is suppressed, and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote...
That metaphor breaks down here and is not really applicable. If two people are chained to each other at the ankles, they can both plausibly argue that the only way to save their own life is to take that of the other person. Whining "but I'm the good guy, I deserve to cut off his foot and let him be the one to bleed to death" is asinine.
The solution here is, of course, to not be chained to the other person irreversibly. But any time that is suggested, we hear a bunch of "We're stronger together, that's crazy talk!" And here we are. 330 million people all chained together, and now people are upset that the other team has the hatchets and is menacingly staring at their ankles.
>and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote
Not sensible enough to vote. Don't leave that part out.
So when a political question arises like "should we have net neutrality?" the elected politicians decide and pass legislation.
That's in contrast to the US, where someone decide the executive was granted discretionary power over net neutrality in 1934, several generations before the net was invented. Then the executive decides there will, then won't, then will, then won't, then will, then won't be net neutrality.
It should be noted that the backdrop here is legislative dysfunction: the congress could have resolved network neutrality at any point but that bogged down for ages. Many of the questions around statutory power look like someone trying to do something under existing rules because they see a problem which isn’t going away but legislative attempts have failed.
Wrong. Democracy means only majority rule. What you say is true of republics, which the USA is. However no republic can be perfect in this regard, because it's all just human beings. In this case the president is plenipotent within the executive branch, the Congress is in the hands of the same party, and the SCOTUS is largely on the same page, therefore all the institutions in question are not going to stop him unless he does things that are outrageous to the public, keeping in mind that the HN commentariat is a tiny portion of "the public".
Democracy as a term has been defined to include represtative Republics for at least a century. Stop being a retrograde pedant.
But Democrats "play nice" and respect the law. Biden could have ordered Trump assassinated as soon as the Supreme Court invented the new interpretation that puts president on a piedestal, but he was never going to do it.
That's the problem with the argument that Republicans need to be careful about setting precedents that Democrats will then also abuse: no Republican believes that any Democratic president will actually do this. In fact, a lot of Republicans probably don't believe that there will ever be another Democratic president.
He pardoned people who stormed the capital, threatened gov officials, and killed police officers. Pardoning DOGE employees is child's play -- but it would never get that far because the DOJ and FBI have been purged of those not fully subservient to Trump.
you mean "He pardoned people who were guided in by the security staff working the capital building"?
Would be interesting to know if the poster would financially support a person in an UNSTABLE position, to, you know, Unite the States in opposition to what's an authoritarian and approaching a fascist dictatorship?
Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.
You're effectively says Congress should mandate every detail of every regulation. Even in areas where knowledge is changing (level of chemicals that are toxic, which medicines are useful and safe, etc).
The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith. And that's worked for most of 200+ years. I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system, even more so when they convince ~50% of the voting popular that "burn it to the ground" is a reasonable take.
The scientific advisors who currently make rules at the EPA (to name one example) probably should have been giving advice to congress to make laws instead. Congress can pass an annual bill of "here's the new science." They already pass laws of unimaginable length and complexity, so I see no reason why Congress can't pass a huge omnibus "these chemicals are bad" bill every year, even if that bill is 5000-10000 pages.
By the way, speaking of the EPA, there's a lot of whiplash in that arm of government based on which party holds the presidency. If the EPA's rules were actual laws, they would need a much stronger mandate from the people to change. IMO this would be better for both environmental protection (since you don't have the party of "drill baby drill" arbitrarily changing things whenever they want) and for business because there is more certainty.
> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.
The whole premise of the American system of government is that power corrupts and a functioning government needs a series of working checks and balances. One arm of America's tripartite government has ceded most of its real power to another arm. This mostly works because the people who get into that other branch (presidents) want to play an iterated game, where burning things to the ground doesn't benefit them. We are seeing what happens when you have someone in power who is playing to win this round without regard for the iterated game.
All that would do is transfer power from bureaucrats within the executive to bureaucrats within the legislature. No Congressperson is fully knowledgeable on all the areas on which they pass laws. Maybe it is a better approach than what we have today, but I'm unconvinced. At least with the system we have today, the bureaucrats are generally experts within their areas. Congressional staffers have no such experience and generally rely on lobbyists.
Think about this in good faith and try to make it work in your head, and you will see that this proposal is actually not that different from how the executive branch rule-makers work today from a day-to-day perspective, while carrying very different legal implications.
That only applies to political appointees. The rank and file are permanent employees (or were until a few weeks ago).
Anyways, not saying your idea couldn't work, only that it's not easily implemented and needs a lot of consideration to do well. It's a wholesale change to how we've governed ourselves for ~150 years. But, the idea of a permanent set of legislative experts has some appeal.
This doesn't even require bad faith actors for it to become a clusterfuck. It's a scaling issue. Things that used to work at smaller scales accumulate cruft and other issues, until things ultimately fall apart. 200 years is of course a good run, but it wasn't going to last forever. Actually 200 years is such a long run, one doesn't have to bring "bad faith actors" into the equation at all to reach this conclusion, but I guess when things start to fall apart some people need someone to blame. Ask yourself this though... if the system was doing so great, how would it have allowed someone like Trump to ever win in the first place (let alone in the second place, as he did in 2024)? That's not a healthy system. Too many were disillusioned, and that's not their fault.
>~50% of the voting popular that "burn it to the ground" is a reasonable take.
They are disgusted with what they see, and have for a very long time felt powerless to change it. Not really just "felt", but were powerless to change it. Trump ran for office, they saw an opportunity. It's not exactly unreasonable, it's just inconvenient to a class of people who have grown comfortable because they're a little closer to the spigots of graft that pour forth. Being "reasonable" in the way you'd use that word hasn't really ever worked for those people, and they waited quite a long time for it to do the trick.
It very much is not.
It is, however, that the people will not simultaneously elect sufficent majorities in both houses of Congress and a President who all fail to do so, such that the systems by which the political branches check eachother continue to function in a way which constrains those actors in either that do act in bad faith.
> I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,
Electoral reforms to the legislative branch that could be done through statute could go a long way to reducing the probability of a sufficient concentration of bad faith actors to overwhelm the system, and electoral and structural reforms to the executive branch to make it less unitary, which would take a Constitutional amendment, could increase the necessary concentration to achieve a total breakdown.
The tradgedy of Trump's first term was that the House of Representatives undermined the legitimacy of that check by using it in partisan, ambiguous and non-compelling circumstances, and failing as a result to obtain a conviction. Using the heavy machinery of impeachment ineffectively made it harder to use should the executive take the tremendous steps you're suggesting.
Anyway, Trump just mocked the leader of a foreign ally for refusing to hold elections. Viewed together, his comments sound like an extended troll of the political opposition.
Say what?!
It's Congress keeping the President in check. BTW, the President is not directly elected by the people and doesn't actually [directly] represent them. The President is elected by the state governments (legislatures) and is supposed to be chosen because the States belief the President will faithfully uphold the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress. It may happen the the States use a popular election to choose their electors that elect the President, at least for now, but the President isn't supposed to represent "the mob" (majority or the populace). It's also why the electoral college is used for electing the President rather than straight popular vote.
And multiply-bankrupt, and (on the second term) multiply-convicted felon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_business_legal_af...
Vox populi, vox Dei, but unfortunately the Deus in question is Κοάλεμος
Political scientist Robert D Putnam suggests that this is in part due to the culture fragmenting and isolating.
Watch 10m video https://youtu.be/5cVSR8MSJvw?si=5NxRUnYENhfzTbXe easy interview with him from recently on that. Interesting.
It's this kind of contempt that got him elected. You have no empathy or interest in the will of the people. Maybe if you talked with some of them, you'd understand their grievances. But something tells me you'd sooner ironically prejudicially dismiss them all as racist bigots.
Norms, are basically the way laws work in the real world.
I despaired, because this is natural to lawyers, and alien entirely to the layperson.
No one is going to think Justice, and then accept “Oh, our norms are how laws work”.
Even the concept of independent executive agencies is probably more vulnerable constitutionally than more people think.
I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch, as informed to me by the other comments. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
In Trump's first administration they realized the trick is to just move so fast that you flood the system and can do whatever you want before anyone sees through all the noise or has a chance to stop you. Steve Bannon was interviewed on camera saying as much.
Look at AirBnB, Uber, Lyft.
All illegal businesses that had enough capital to burn through lawsuits and keep operations going until they were too big to fail and whipped the snot out of city and state legal counsels.
It might rarely be admitted openly, but it sometimes is alluded to... e.g. Eric Schmidt's Stanford talk where he said:
"I want to say that if your product becomes popular, you can hire a bunch of lawyers to sort everything out. If no one uses your product, don’t worry -- no one will care that you stole someone else’s content."
I don't believe that anyone who has worked in any official capacity would make such claims. The distortion of such well-defined practices is an attempt to gloss over the illegality of unprecedented events in progress right now.
Change the data, Firing everybody , leave no way to contact them, this is not auditing.
They are sincerely following Project 2025, decimating government, and very likely to fire A LOT more federal workers over the summer, then they will install Loyalists throughout.
Billionaire Musk .. aka "The Auditor" .. is "primarying" or threatening to fund opposition candidates for Senators who fight him on this.
It's an autogolpe.
The president needs the Senate's "advice and consent" to hire principal officers, and does not need the Senate's "advice and consent" for certain other officers as specified by statute. The US Digital Service ("DOGE") is an agency where he did not need the Senate's advice and consent.
The president does NOT need the Senate's advice and consent to fire anyone in the executive branch. For principal officers this was established by the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson for firing a confirmed cabinet secretary nominated by Lincoln. For other officers this was established by judicial precedent fairly recently when Biden terminated two Trump appointees to minor offices and they sued (and lost).
Similarly the president needs the Senate's advice and consent to enter into treaties. The Constitution is silent as to terminating Senate-confirmed executive officers, officers whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation, or treaties (abrogation). It's essentially settled law that the president does not require the Senate's advice and consent for any of those kinds of terminations.
Therefore, under the Constitution and the political and binding judicial precedents, there can be no law "onto which government workers can cling to refuse these requests."
Copying what I typed elsewhere, I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.
> I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history
The various assassinations of presidents were kinds of coups, don't you think? Soon we'll find out if the CIA did or did not kill JFK. Suppose the CIA killed JFK -for argument's sake-, surely that would have been a coup, no?
For instance, there is no law allowing the president to do a SELECT * in the income tax database. So an honest government worker can just say f-off when he is requested to do so.
It's not often you're asked to do something that could break the law, with the whistle-blowing chain being potentially broken at the top.
The other thing is that in the US, people's lives depend on their jobs, with half of polled people indicating they live paycheck to paycheck. This makes them easy to manipulate into complying, putting their morals aside because standing up for morals or indeed the law will mean they lose their job.
I mean the US president declared yesterday that only he gets to decide on law and called himself king on his social media. There's heaps of 'legal' texts that indicate it means he can be deposed and yote into jail, but if there's nobody enforcing them they're useless.
We should all have "root access" to everything but the most national-security sensitive topics.