Good news and bad news this morning. The DOGEbros have been banned from accessing Treasury's payment systems:
Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the Trump administration from granting access to those categories of officials.
Elon won't like this. On the other hand, he still has access to Department of Labor data for now:
In his ruling, federal Judge John D. Bates found that the five federal employee unions that alleged Elon Musk's cost-cutting team sought to illegally access highly sensitive data, including medical records, failed to establish standing.
But USAID is getting a reprieve:
In an order late Friday, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols -- a Trump appointee -- issued a temporary restraining that prevents Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency from placing the employees on administrative leave as had been planned. The judge also ordered the reinstatement of some 500 USAID workers who had already been put on administrative leave and ordered that no USAID employees should be evacuated from their host countries before Feb. 14 at 11:59 p.m.
At some point these cases are all going to turn on fundamental questions of legality. USAID, for example, was established and funded by Congress. It's just flatly illegal for Trump to unilaterally shut it down. The same is true for the CFPB. And letting a bunch of guys root around in private government data for no reason they're willing to explain—that's almost certainly illegal too.
In the end, almost all this stuff will end up being halted. The only question remaining is whether Musk and Trump will obey court orders. If they don't, the Supreme Court is going to slap them down hard. Regardless of how they feel on the merits, they won't stand for defying the judiciary.
it's funny that Kev posts this the day after 2025 gets approved to control the budget office and interim head of CFPB.
post facto rulings may have a chance to oblige repair but guarantee nothing.
Yep. My response is: OK, so did anybody make them fix it? Or is this just the courts saying "you can't do that" with no followup?
The Judiciary has no police or army of its own. Enforcement of court orders is up to the DOJ which is clearly and completely under the control of the people the court is attempting to restrain. There is really no "there" there.
Yes, the test is: will Trump/Musk pay attention? I will be happy if I am wrong about what I think the answer is.
That's my point exactly. How many divisions (or battalions of police) does the judiciary command?
So when Il Duce and Herr Musk defy SCOTUS, then what?
Oh, so the MAGA GOP Congress, Faux News, WSJ, Newsmax, and his MAGA worshiping ultra right wing Nazi supporters are going to rise up when that happens?
+100
John Roberts has already given Trump a get out of jail free card and he can pardon anybody that it directs to commit a crime. Trump knows that he can do whatever he wants and as long as he has 35 votes in the Senate, he is immune from any kind of punishment. It isn't even clear that the Roberts court would even oppose any of this.
Yup.
All he has to do is remove any security they have right after he gets his cult all agitated.
One can do worse than read Paul Krugman's thoughts - well reasoned and well informed - on this in his substack.
I wish I could be that optimistic.
Let me know when it is reined in and beaten to death. No optimism until then.
That is the problem. Our system is predicated on cooperation between the various players. There is no other enforcement mechanism for many of the laws we claim to live by.
The founders assumed personal honor and sense of duty and patriotism would serve as a kind of glue for this whole thing. They never could have imagined what kind of craven, self-centered, criminal assholes would end up taking over and burning the whole thing down.
It's money in politics. Remove that and virtually all the motivation for this shit goes away.
The founding fathers thought the separation of powers could stop this. Of course that requires that the players have some modicum amount of honor and that swearing to uphold the Constitution means something to them.
The "separation of powers" never required "honor" or any of that stuff: just self interest.
The Congress, and each house individually, was to jealously guard and assert its own unique powers. Members would not stand for being marginalized or made irrelevant, by either the courts or the executive. Same goes for the executive and judicial branches. Each asserting its own power to say "no" -- or "yes", as the case may be.
However, the Republican Party today has lost all those impulses. It's been Party over Nation for the last 40+ years. And now, the whole Party is a minion of that one man. So, given that this party now controls all three branches, there IS no "separation of powers" anymore.
Unless the Democrats in Congress, both House and Senate, use their slim near-parity to throw sand in the gears.
It isn’t even Party over Nation anymore; it’s ME first, last, and only, led by the Narcissist-in-Chief. The Republicans in Congress are just there to build their résumés for a cushy job at a defense contractor, think tank, right-wing propaganda outlet, or prestige law firm. Meantime, get on the teevee as much as possible, and suck up to TFM so you don’t get primaried.
"The Republicans in Congress are just there to build their résumés .."
That is wrong.
If they dared to go against Trump they would get rid og him immediately. But they are afraid of the response from MAGA, primaries but also actual violence.
your observation is not incompatible with what KenShulz said.
The point (which I thought was obvious) is that they do want to keep their power as congress people, rather than see it as just "résumé building".
They want to keep the power they get as individual congresspeople, but surely you would agree they are not defending the power of the legislative branch
Cretainly they care about their own personal power, but that depends on the power of the congress. With Trump as president they lose this power.
No they didn't. They thought Congress, acting from self interest, would crush any president trying to take their powers.
the Supreme Court is going to slap them down hard
With what army? The court has made it clear: the president can't be held legally accountable for anything he does in office and he'll just pardon anyone else in legal jeopardy. As long as Congressional Republicans willingly go along with this, he's effectively a dictator. The only remedy will be to destroy the GOP electorally in 2026, but by then who knows if we'll even be holding elections any longer.
Oh, and have you seen the price of eggs recently?
This is the real question.
The number of armed troops under the command of the Supreme Court is also the percentage chance of the Supreme Court being able to stop any of this: zero.
I am seeing a lot of folks stating at various levels of probability that Trump would defy a Supreme Court order he did not like. And while it is possible (anything is possible), has he done anything like that before? I don't think he has ever really floated that idea, and he certainly floats all sort of weird shit that he really has no intention of going through with in a serious way.
Trump is awful in so many ways, but I think we need to be careful in assuming the absolutely worst about everything all the time.
Experimentally, assuming the worst is the best approach for predicting Trump's behaviour.
Name me one law that Trump has found burdensome that he hasn't just scrapped in the weeks he's been in power. Just one, where he tried something, got bad news from Congress or a courtroom, and stopped. And not just said he stopped, but demonstrably stopped?
This is an odd distinction that I see people making. Even while Trump is actively defying and ignoring various laws, assume people insist that Trump is unlikely to defy a courts ruling on the law. He has just defied a prior courts ruling on the law and is acting illegally, but we are pretending that we can't find reason to believe he would do it again?
Trump is only 2 weeks into the era where the SC ruled that Presidents named Donald cannot commit a crime while in office. So it is hard to predict all the outcomes in this new era, but it isn't looking good so far.
It's disheartening to see people recognize that defiance of the law is happening right now and then state that they can't think of any times when the law was openly defied by the President. It's happening right now.
"Defy" happens in more ways than one. What people would usually mean by defying a court order is saying "hell no, let 'em make me." In other words, acknowledging that a court has said no, but saying "I do not comply with your stupid opinion." That's direct defiance, like Wallace in front of the auditorium door at U of Alabama, and I don't think we've seen that from this administration so far.
There's also simply ignoring a court decision -- not acknowledging it at all and just going ahead on the same track. That would be ignoring or flouting a ruling, no in-your-face necessary; iow defying by disregarding. That could be happening right now at the various Dogie targets where courts have ordered them to stop. We just have no real way to know that in real time because everything is hush-hush except what Musk wants to tweet at us.
Things look similar if we broaden out to "defying the law," and for my money, by acting as if there is no extant law that applies to spending appropriated money, or abolishing federal departments, or firing federal officials and employees, trump is defying the law as we speak. That part is as brazen and direct as it can get.
If you ask me, he hasn't directly defied a court order yet because Vought and others among the coup plotters are undecided between simply "establishing facts on the ground" as fast as they can, and working to get SCOTUS's stamp of approval on the whole thing. Lower court rulings don't really matter in either case.
But the high court does matter -- the point of having it bless presidential absolutism would be to keep the lawyers on board all the way through this mess, and to eventually provide leverage over everybody, everywhere, that's read into law and can't be questioned within the system. Last time around a lot of the lawyers bailed and outright revolted -- iirc most of the key people who jumped off the J6 train and derailed things after the election were lawyers -- and they don't want that happening again.
And with the court behind them, they could say the lines of authority are complete and unbroken from the framers to our time and all is legitimate and hunkey-dorey and there's no basis for non-obedience. On the other hand, open defiance of the courts at this point would just feed resistance. IOW, I kind of think it's a tactical decision not to get into direct open defiance.
Well he did try to overturn an election result. Ignoring a court decision would be trivial compared to that.
“In the end” is the key insight. Courts move slowly, Musk can do a ton of irreparable damage quickly.
Can we stop calling their fake department by their meme name? Every time you say the name, it makes Elon's ego just a little bit more aroused. I say we all just stop.
It's a dumb fucking meme.
Thank you!
Let's just keep calling it "Doggie." It lacks dignity, but gets the point across.
+1
I would feel a bit more comfortable if there were court-appointed observers on some of these departments to ensure the orders actually get followed. I don't trust Musk's DOGE employees to not break the law if he's yelling at them to do it, and saying Trump will just pardon them if they do.
Yeah. Telling these guys to return or destroy info they have downloaded is witless, so obviously toothless it asks for more lawbreaking.
A bump in the road… easily ignored. Are we still pretending courts matter? 😂
"the Supreme Court is going to slap them down hard"
Oh that is just too funny. The Supreme Court has already ruled that laws do not apply to Donald Trump. Why are they going to change their minds now?
Technically wrong, I think. The SC ruled that Trump cannot be prosecuted for "official" actions. Not that all "official" actions are legal.
Still, I think Kevin is unrealistic when he says the SC will "slap them down", let alone "hard". Kevin doesn't have a good record on this. Remember, he was confident that the SC would reject Trump's appeal that he had immunity by 8-1 or 7-2.
That leaves impeachment and conviction as the only possible direct enforcement action against a lawbreaking President. Indirectly, how much could a bare majority in both Houses restrain the Executive by, say, defunding White House staff?
https://pennsylvaniaindependent.com/politics/republicans-government-shutdown-defunding-white-house-officials-2/
It doesn't need to be for long just cut them all off for a week to remind everyone that congress makes the laws.The president gets to suggest laws and must carry out the laws created by congress. In between he can also tell congress that he doesn't like the law at which point they get to say we don't care, we are about 66% sure it is the right thing to do.
Remember, "Trump is acting like a king because he's too weak to govern like a president."
But if the executive controls the bank account, it doesn't matter what Congress says should or shouldn't be spent. They'll just pay themselves anyway.
I think Musk may come to regret some of the paper trail he's been leaving.
It's already clearly annoying the DOJ. The line they're trying to take is "the President has the right to staff the government as he wishes." That's not true, but even if it were, there is a big difference between "I think these people are incompetent and want new people" and "firing them is pretextural; I want to not fulfill my congressional responsibilities and mass firings let me do that."
Musk is just openly laying out that he's doing the latter.
From my republican rep huzinga today…
President Trump used his authority to rename and reorganize the United States Digital Service to the United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Service on January 20, 2025. DOGE is tasked with modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. This executive order also directed federal agencies to establish their own DOGE teams, which may be comprised of Special Government Employees, to coordinate their work with DOGE. Special Government Employees are temporary government officials expected to work less than 130 days in a calendar year.
At the direction of the President, entrepreneur and tech business owner, Elon Musk, has been closely engaged with DOGE in his capacity as a Special Government Employee.
As you may know, it has been reported that U.S. Department of Treasury's DOGE team has expanded on the Biden Administration's review of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service's payment systems in order to improve payment integrity. In response to congressional concerns, the Treasury has made it clear that the ongoing operational review is not resulting in the suspension, delay, rerouting, or rejection of any payments, including those related to Social Security and Medicare payments. Furthermore, this review and the DOGE and veteran career Treasury officials involved are subject to all standard security, safety, and privacy standards. The Treasury has also highlighted the payment systems' already robust and effective protections.
As this administration continues its important work to make our government's digital systems more efficient, I want to let you know that I agree that DOGE must abide by President Trump's executive order to work within the law and adhere to rigorous data protection standards.
Nothing to see here. All above board and legal. Started by Biden! 😂
You believe they might ignore lower courts but adhere to the highest court? If they're going to selectively adhere to rulings, the entire system is broken and democracy is already dead.
"And letting a bunch of guys root around in private government data for no reason they're willing to explain—that's almost certainly illegal too."
And these dudes are unvetted. Also, likely they have seen classified documents and other private data that it is not legal for them to access. In normal times, you'd think that Musk and his team would already be under investigation for crimes.
Unvetted is an understatement. Edward Coristine before becoming part of the DOGE posse was fired by a cybersecurity company for sharing information with a competitor.
Illegal means nothing to these guys. They've clearly decided they're above the law. And why not? SCOTUS's ridiculous ruling has emboldened them. Most of the checks and balances in the Constitution depend on good-faith actors. We don't have those anymore. They've created a monster and are powerless to restrain him.
There is one glimmer of hope. If they crash everything and the stock market tanks, there will be enough powerful people losing enough money that they might place a phone call to Trump. So basically, things have to go completely to shit before it can get better.
Won't someone for once think of those poor besieged ultra wealthy folks....
If they're the ones who finally stop the worst of Trump, even for selfish reasons, I'll gladly lay a wreath at their door.
Seriously: does ANYONE truly believe they are obeying the courts?
In at least three published incidents, DOJ has sad that if the court's order conflicts with their interpretation of Trump's Supreme Executive Authority, as Monty Python would say, they will ignore it. That battle is lost.
The war may be lost when he tells SCOTUS to go f--k themselves.
At that point, MAGA house and senate have a decision to make.
They already made it.
The most telling thing about all of this is that Republicans have pretty much admitted they could never realize their goals of destroying the government through any kind of democratic process -- electing majorities and then having those representatives vote on new policies. Things like the ACA and SS and Medicare and civil rights are popular. They had to seize dictatorial powers and let an unelected oligarch and his minions do it extralegally.
People voted for cheap eggs and deporting MS-13 members, not having Elon Musk rifle through their government records and wreak havoc with Medicaid payments, to say nothing of these Project 2025 loons banning pr0n and forcing women into handmaid's dresses. There will be a price to pay for all of this, though whether it will be at the ballot box or not remains to be seen. If they sense this is blowing up for them electorally, they're going to start looking for some Reichstag fire to allow Trump to declare martial law and indefinitely suspend elections.
".. Trump to declare martial law .."
It is imporatnt to realize that the dismantling of democracy doesn't happen (based on history) through imposing martial law. It happens by intimidating political opponents. Martial law comes much later.
Trump clearly undertsands this, which is why he nominates people like Bondi and Katel, so he can use the FBI and DOJ to intimidate opponents.
That's true. But intimidating opponents is one thing. To suspend/delay elections there would have to be some national emergency underway that would necessitate the suspension of normal constitutional processes and laws. It's possible, with the right amount of creative thinking, to come up with something.
My point is that he doesn't need to suspend elections to become a dictator. Putin, for example, didn't suspend elections in Russia. He just eliminated (physically in some cases) any opposition. That is the way Trump is going.
Thinking about elections suspension is misleading, and may mean you lose democracy before you notice it. You just have a elections without any serious opponent for Trump or his toady-candidate.
“Republicans have pretty much admitted they could never realize their goals of destroying the government through any kind of democratic process…”
Um… Republicans got to where they are this year through our democratic process handing them the White House and both houses of Congress last November. I don’t like it, and I also don’t think they all knew what they were really voting for, but the American people collectively voted for all of this, which is the definition or “democracy.”
"democratic process" doesn't only mean winning elections. It also mean following the constitution and laws. Trump and Musk clearly don't do that at the moment. Presumably that what jte21 refers to.
“Democratic process” means just that the people got to freely choose their leadership. (We can quibble on whether voter suppression occurred, but if it did, it couldn’t have been very large since the well-funded Democratic Party didn’t challenge the results… unless you’re also arguing the Democrats are incompetent which may be true.)
The phrase you’re looking for that means “following the constitution and laws” is “rule of law.” They are different in that even non democracies can have rule of law. For example, Singapore has rule of law despite definitely not being a democracy.
Democracy cannot survive without rule of law, so the democratic process needs to include it.
Ofcourse you can insists that the democratic process does not include rule of law, it just doesn't make sense.
This is a fairly meaningless semantic nit you are picking.
The joys of the interent.
I'm not arguing that they didn't win an election. I'm arguing that what they're doing with that majority is not enacting policies in line with the law and Constitution, it's that they're ceding near-dictatorial powers to the president and a bunch of unelected goons to do extralegal stuff they would never go on record voting for. And they're doing it because they know that large majorities of the public didn't sign on for this shit. They had to lie and lie and lie and lie to eke out this win and the only thing they have now is more lying and deception to implement their fascist vision of America.
And we haven't even seen what devastation the DOJ and FBI will wreak on our democracy with the lunatics he's installed there. And over which Congress will exercise absolutely no oversight.
Even Hitler and the Nazis were elected democratically. Democratic process does not prevent voters from making horrible mistakes - it never has in any other democracy that ever existed.
I think you're overlooking that they've done their level best to subvert the democratic process via voter suppression and other means.
I assume the Democratic Party in 2024 was well funded and competent enough to have challenged any widespread voter suppression or voter shenanigans that would’ve affected an individual race? (They are presently doing so for the NC Supreme Court for example.)
If my assumptions are true, then voter suppression didn’t affect the federal election outcome. No election is perfect but there’s no evidence of relevant voter suppression in 2024 either.
Don’t get me wrong. I *hate* that the country voted to destroy itself. But that is the democratic outcome that happened in November 2024. Voters never have had perfect knowledge or perfect access to the ballot, but all indications are that the American electorate wanted Trump to have full control of government. And he does now.
I interpreted it to mean, at least partially, campaigning on those things, and that they meant that the Republican Party has known that they can only accomplish their anti-democratic aims through bait-and-switch means. Campaign on inflation and immigration, then simply tear apart the government when you win. The illegality of much of what they're doing is simply another layer.
They could accomplish much the same thing through normal legislative processes, given how subservient to Trump basically the entire Republican delegation is, but they're betting that they can get away with doing it outside of the legal processes because they think their governing majority in Congress won't stop them. And they're probably correct.
Posts like this would have made sense in oh I dunno, any time before 2021.
But now it seems comically obtuse and out of touch. It's as if Kevin slept through the last 4 years and has no understanding of the judicial system he's commenting on.
Imagine a similar take on the bird flu that didn't take into account anything that happened during Covid. Like it never happened.
C'est bizarre
It's been like Pizzagate, except inside the federal government. I hope it actually stops.
A cabal of internet trolls and computer hackers have taken over our government, but everything is fine! It's FINE! The United States is a nation of laws, after all, and the trolls and hackers can't just do anything like shut down government agencies. When they try to do that, the courts will tell them they cannot. When they do it anyway, the Supreme Court will tell them they cannot. And when they still do it anyway, we can still abide the lesson we learned from our old friend Wile E. Coyote.
We're all gonna be fine as long as we don't look down. You may be thinking about it, but DON'T! Don't even take a peak. No, no, no! Whatever you do, don't you ever, ever look down!
Fascist movements quickly jump from pretending to represent the interests of the common man to openly working with the wealthy seats of power. Trump has certainly made this leap while also consolidating the internal party followers.
There are no longer any opposing voices and no pretense that he is working for the people that voted for him. But a few judges have issued temporary, limited speed bumps, that may or may not impact the limited situations they address. So there's that.
All this discussion about Musk obtaining *records* of projects and personnel is find and dandy, but it misses a more important problem:
All those computer systems are compromised. Maybe, if there are detailed logs of code changes, they can be reviewed to see what vulnerabilities have been introduced. But I doubt it given what we know about Musk's operatives.
The damage has already been done. No amount of court rulings can undo it. The integrity of federal computer systems has been shattered.
Not good if DOGE screws up gov payments so bad everyone is shorted, and rebuilding it will make the 2009 meltdown look tame
Worse is that DOGE is able to just screw the Have Nots. All Republicans and god forbid a some Dems will be fine with that, especially when the economy works so well, . . . . assuming you made the cut of course.
Instead of helping everyone, when you ignore the folks who need help (just label them all lazy welfare cheaters, and you'll sleep just fine) it's so much easier to make ends meet, especially for the Haves and Have Mores
I doubt that any president has ever been so quick to have an agency name removed from a building as trump was in the case of the USAID office.
Joe Conason wrote about some of the agency's supporters & projects - one notably a trump supporters:
https://www.alternet.org/franklin-graham-2671119286/
For the sake of the argument, let's construct a simple hypothetical:
1. Judge grants temporary injunction forbidding X. Musk ignores it. (This is where we’re at now.)
2. Judge makes injunction permanent. Trump appeals. Musk keeps right on doing X.
3. Appeals bench upholds decision. Trump appeals to Supreme Court. Musk keeps right on doing X.
4. Supreme Court upholds decision. Trump announces he cannot comply, because X has gone past the point of no return and cannot be reversed.
What, beyond some sharp comments from the bench in a future decision, will this “slapping down” consist of?
For the sake of argument, let's construct a simple different hypothetical:
1. The house impeaches Trump and Vance for High Crimes and Misdemeanors
2. The senate convicts
3. The speaker of the house becomes president (congratulations that was a US constitutionally approved semi-coup)
4. President Mike Johnson decides to charge the oligarch who tried to takeover the government with a long list of crimes
What beyond fleeing the country and having his US assets seized can Musk do?
Oh and I assume the Supreme Court is going to pretend to rein in executive power after the fact by ruling that once impeached presidential acts can be prosecuted.
You really got to cut back on the weed, man.
Let's look at your typical Bond villain, having at his disposal more money and resources than almost any other individual human in recorded history even after confiscation, and holding a wee grudge after said confiscation.
He might hypothetically ally with an unfriendly nation-state -- let's say China, where a large portion of his assets reside -- and use his control of Starlink together with his knowledge of government and private computer and communications systems in the US and worldwide, and in combination with his new allies' vast electronic resources, might proceed to blow up said government and private computer and communication systems throughout the western world. Throughout the entire world ex-China, because why not? And how vital is Starlink to that project after all?
With enough money and malice, the evil that can be done is limited only by imagination. Isn't that kind of Ian Fleming's message for us?
What's not apparent is the damage and harm that has already been done and will be done before injunctions for each breach can stop them.
And it's not a guarantee that stopping them from accessing or having write permissions on certain parts of either the network or databases will prevent them from causing damage or harm.
Furthermore, once they drop in coding that creates reports, they'll have a constant stream of data reporting to them, whether or not they're legally allowed to access that data.
Finally, they're operating without restrictions other than injunctions. They have no protocols to stick to, no documentation requirements, zero transparency. No one actually knows what they're really doing. This is a recipe for disaster in mission critical systems.
The big question is what happens when they defy the court orders, which they will.