Donald Trump has empowered his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk to take over federal agencies — and Democrat lawmakers are scrambling to respond.
Democrats denounced the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by Musk and his cadre of youthful software engineers, saying that neither the president nor his unelected, foreign-born backer have the authority to take over congressionally authorized agencies, and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told The New Republic's Greg Sargent what actions they might take to stop them.
"The U.S. Agency for International Development was established by an act of Congress, and you suddenly have Elon Musk showing up and trying to gut it, locking out all the employees, locking them out of their offices, locking them out of their emails, pausing the funding for things that were passed in budgets by Congress and signed by presidents of the United States," Beyer said.
"None of that corresponds to the rule of law."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and his team are already preparing lawsuits to block Musk's actions, Beyer said, and there have also been challenges in court from federal employees' unions. The Virginia Democrat said they planned to challenge the tech mogul's role in Trump's administration.
"Not only his shutting down USAID but also the notion that Elon Musk has gotten in and fired the people responsible for the payment system at U.S. Treasury — $6 trillion a year, which includes income tax refunds, Social Security payments, the salaries of our federal workers, including our military, all of our Army, Navy, Air Force," Beyer said.
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"We’ve given a corrupt businessman, the wealthiest person in the world, control over that. God knows where he will send that money or what he will use it for. So yeah, we will very much challenge it."
"So many of these things are classified documents at various levels," he added, "and here’s a guy who has absolutely no security clearance, and couldn’t pass the security clearance if he was subjected to it based on all of his connections with China ... and his young minions, his 22- and 23-year-olds also who have never been subjected to a security clearance, [who] do not have permission to view classified documents. They’re in there on top of a $6 trillion payment system, which is clearly very classified."
Democrats intend to challenge many of Trump's executive orders, Beyer said, but they're uniting around the strategy of telling the president and congressional Republicans they would not vote for any legislation or nominee until Musk's governmental power has been rescinded.
"We spent a lot of today, and the last week, just talking about it," Beyer said. "It’s hard for us because we believe in the institution — the institutions of government, the institution of Congress. It’s hard to go to work and say, 'We’re going to go gum up the works as best we can' because we want it to work. On the other hand, if that’s the only tool we have in order to rein in this dictatorial example of power, then we must use it."
"For example, the senators, they voted en masse as Democrats for people like Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum," he added. "Maybe from this day on, they don’t do any of that. Put those types of things that used to be routine and make them not routine until Trump stops breaking the law."
