A week after winning a second term, Donald Trump made an unexpected declaration: He said Senate Republicans should agree to let him make recess appointments to his White House Cabinet. This wasn’t an issue that had come up during the campaign; this wasn’t a priority for Trump during his first term; and given that his own party would have a Senate majority — and Cabinet nominees can’t be filibustered — the appeal didn’t make a lot of sense.
But it was the first meaningful indication that as Trump prepared to return to power, he intended to shift even more power to the Oval Office and away from Congress, even one led by Republicans.
Soon after, Ruth Marcus, before her departure from The Washington Post, published an important pre-inaugural summary, noting that Trump’s vision also included “refusing to spend money that lawmakers have appropriated” as part of a power grab.
Four months after the president’s second inaugural, these efforts are ongoing — and expanding. The New York Times reported:
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is now seeking to investigate a federal agency with a mission similar to its own: the Government Accountability Office, which has been hunting for waste and inefficiency in government since the 1920s. The Government Accountability Office said in a statement on Friday that it had rejected a request from Mr. Musk’s group to “assign a team” to the century-old budget agency.
“As a legislative branch agency, G.A.O. is not subject to executive orders and has therefore declined any requests to have a DOGE team assigned,” the agency said in its written statement.
It’s not altogether clear why the DOGE operation showed up at the GAO’s doors, but the agency’s statement was entirely correct: This is a congressional office. It’s an open question as to whether DOGE should be targeting executive branch agencies, but since Elon Musk’s operation is part of the White House, those efforts at least don’t raise any concerns related to the separation of powers.
But the Government Accountability Office (which was the Government Accounting Office until Republicans changed its name in 2004) is unambiguously part of the legislative branch.
What’s more, this is clearly a piece of a larger puzzle. Earlier this month, for example, Trump fired the Librarian of Congress and took steps to control the office. The president similarly ousted the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, which is overseen by the Library of Congress.
Late last week, Politico reported that the DOGE operation also tried to gain access to “the congressional office which fields and manages complaints about discrimination, harassment, accessibility and other workplace issues, according to three congressional employees granted anonymity to describe the sensitive situation.” For good measure, let’s also not forget that the president plans to accept a superluxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a move that should involve congressional approval, though the White House apparently doesn’t intend to bother. For those concerned about Trump’s authoritarian-style ambitions, the fact that he and his team are encroaching on Congress’ authority on multiple fronts, simultaneously and in a seemingly systematic way, should raise all kinds of alarms. As The Associated Press summarized, there’s suddenly “an enormous fight over the separation of powers” underway, and it’s “a power struggle with potentially vast consequences.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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