‘Check out Schoolhouse Rock’: J.D. Vance gets lesson on how government works

Vice President JD Vance faced sharp criticism from a wide range of voices on Monday—including one who alleged “intellectual dishonesty”—after the Ohio Republican appeared to offer an inaccurate and insufficient explanation of how the executive branch of the federal government is supposed to function.

“Career bureaucrats don’t get to violate lawful orders from the President of the United States. They answer to the president, and he answers to the people. Really not that complicated,” Vance wrote on social media.

Critics suggested that Vance, who has a Yale Law School degree, wasn’t exactly correct.

The vice president appeared to be referring to some or all of the four U.S. government agencies that Elon Musk’s associates reportedly entered and where, in some reported cases, they locked out career civil servants. In some cases, they also allegedly accessed government files, including personnel records and confidential data: U.S. Treasury, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and General Services Administration (GSA).

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“Note well @JDVance’s false understanding of the Constitution. Indeed, it appears that when they sloganeered ‘we’re a republic, not a democracy,’ they didn’t mean a constitutional republic. BTW, orders to shut down Congressionally mandated programs & agencies are *not* lawful,” wrote Eric Chenoweth, the Director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe (IDEE).

“Yale Law Grad JD would like to remind you that violating Congress’ appropriations orders is a crime,” snarked civil rights and national security journalist Marcy Wheeler.

Steven Horrell of the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) boiled it all down: “Government employees swear an oath to the Constitution, not the President.”

“Much more complicated when the President is not also a king,” added New York University Professor of Economics Alberto Bisin. “These statements are really bothersome in their intellectual dishonesty … intellectuals on the right should not let them go … for their side’s own good … it does not end well for the institutional structure we/they rely upon.”

Many have been concerned over Musk and Trump’s apparent efforts to shutter agencies created by Congress, that can only be closed down by Congress.

USAID, an independent agency of the United States government, was established by executive order of President John F. Kennedy, at Congress’s direction. The agency delivers humanitarian aid and has been working to end HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, according to former Assistant USAID Administrator for Global Health, Atul Gawande. After several days of being targeted by Elon Musk and his associates, it was reported that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was made acting head of USAID and the agency will be folded into the U.S. State Department.

Trump appears to be using the same playbook for another independent federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The president “on Monday appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a powerful watchdog agency whose operations Bessent immediately halted pending a review,” according to The Washington Post. “In an email to agency staff sent from the ‘acting director,’ Bessent ordered the bureau to cease all work to craft regulations, enforce its rules, conduct investigations or provide ‘public communications of any type,’ citing a need to ‘promote consistency’ with the goals of the new administration, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.”

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Responding to Vice President Vance’s attack on “career bureaucrats,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and an expert on Russian intelligence wrote: “They answer to the Constitution, not a king.”

“Civil servants & service members swear an oath to faithfully uphold the Constitution & carry out the laws, as you have. That means not following unlawful orders, like shutting down agencies without an act of Congress or taking down public data Congress mandated be disclosed,” observed digital governance expert and open government advocate Alexander Howard, the founder of Civic Texts, a publication focused on emerging technologies, digital democracy and public policy.

Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio served up a memorable response.

“If the Money has already been appropriated then yes they do. There is a budget process. You may want to check out Schoolhouse rock,” he said, referring to the iconic 1970s cartoon famous for “How a bill becomes a law.”

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