Stephen Vladeck:
I mean, so far as it goes, Geoff, which is to say, not very far.
I mean, yes, the — DOGE is an office within the executive office of the president. The president is allowed to have subordinates who do his bidding. But those subordinates are even more bound to follow the relevant statutory constraints as the president is. And in this case, there are mandatory appropriations that the executive branch is not abiding by.
There are statutes limiting, for example, the ability to cut funding for NIH, which the executive branch is not abiding by. So I think that’s a fair amount of deflection the part of Chairman Jordan’s part. The reality here is that we have an executive branch that is claiming the authority to exercise just about unfettered control over federal spending, over the federal bureaucracy, and, at least through the vice president, over the federal courts.
And James Madison wrote in one of the Federalist Papers that the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, may justly be pronounced the definition of tyranny. We’re not there yet, but there’s a reason why these statutes are important constraints. There’s a reason why we depend upon the courts to enforce these statutes.
Just because Elon Musk has all of this sway within the executive branch doesn’t change any of the legal analysis about whether the executive branch can really trample on these congressional powers.
