Is Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire entrepreneur tasked by President Donald Trump to cut government spending with the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), acting within the law?
It’s a question on a lot of minds as DOGE cuts impact livelihoods and projects both at home and abroad. Musk himself claims that he simply wants to cut down on waste and fraud, but at least one expert warns that his moves might serve to weaken Constitutional power.
“We’ve got Elon Musk doing a lot of things domestically, which I had some difficulties with on a constitutional level and a contract level, Andy Smith, director of the University New Hampshire Survey Center, told WWL’s Tommy Tucker in a recent interview.
He noted that the Trump administration’s moves so far have resulted in uncertainty that’s now being reflected in the stock market and approval ratings.
Smith isn’t the only person concerned about Musk – an unelected citizen who originally hails from South Africa – and his integration into U.S.
government. In early February, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) said that he had “illegally” accessed sensitive government information on private American citizens at the request of Trump when Musk obtained access to Treasury Department’s federal payment system.
“Elon Musk is a private citizen with massive foreign debts, countless conflicts of interest, and unknown personal motivations that disqualify him from serving in the federal government,” she said. “Still, President Trump has allowed him to illegally raid the United States government, seemingly for his own gain.”
Then the Campaign Legal Center nonprofit watchdog group founded by Trevor Potter, a Republican former Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, said this month that: “Musk and DOGE have absolutely no legal right to make decisions as to how our government spends money – that is up to Congress – or to take control of the federal government in the shadows.”
Like Smith, the CLC said that Musk actions threaten to dismantle the U.S. system of government. It announced that it had filed a lawsuit to “stop this illegal power grab.”
Multiple moves to terminate federal employees have also been met with lawsuits. For example, Audacy reported last month that Judge William H. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that the termination of probationary federal employees was illegal “because OPM had no authority to order it.”
This week, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., granted in part a motion for a preliminary injunction that asked the court to allow humanitarian work to continue while a lawsuit challenging the administration’s foreign-assistance freeze moves forward, according to the Public Citizen Litigation Group.
“Today’s decision affirms a basic principle of our Constitution: the president is not a king,” said Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel on this case.
Smith also mentioned that separation of powers is important in U.S. government.
“Well, the way I look at it is that the president takes an oath of office to faithfully execute the law and execute his office as president and defend and protect the Constitution,” he explained. “The Constitution says that it’s Congress who makes the laws. Congress passes those laws that create the agencies. It’s up to Congress then to change those laws, it’s not up to the president to do that.”
However, Smith said that the U.S. has been on a journey for the past 75 years (give or take) to weaken those powers. Trump might be doing it now with his call to close down USAID and more, but in past years, Smith said former President Joe Biden was behind some similar moves.
“Republicans were really very upset with the Biden administration… not enforcing… laws against illegal immigration, or… deciding that he’s going to forgive student loans,” Smith said. “Those were unconstitutional actions on the part of the Biden administration, I think, which rightly Republicans called him out on and took to the courts. Well, now Democrats are doing the same thing to the Trump administration.”
He thinks that Democrats will have the same legal ground to stand on when it comes to the moves of Trump and Musk.
“Politics is all about power – and our government is structured in a way to try to minimize powers to be concentrated in the hands of any one branch of government or one person,” said Smith. “And that, I think, is the thing that's made the United States a successful country for over 250 years.”