For years, the Republican Party — and ultra-wealthy businessmen in general — have warned about "unelected bureaucrats" and the danger they pose to accountable government. But when they are handed unified control of Washington, they immediately bring in their own to control everything, wrote Ryan Teague Beckwith for MSNBC.
The principal way they are already doing this, he wrote, is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, in which two pro-Trump billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are heading up an unofficial task force, outside the government itself, to essentially make recommendations from on high about which federal programs and services should be cut.
All their complaints about "unelected decision-makers working without authorization from Congress and the Constitution" don't matter, he said, because "as it turns out, these critics don’t really mind any of those things, as long as they’re the ones in charge."
Nor are Musk and Ramaswamy alone, Beckwith noted — another billionaire, Marc Andreessen, is now helping Trump strategize on massive government changes, despite his recent complaints on Joe Rogan's podcast about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency that has returned billions of dollars to taxpayers from corporate misconduct, as "an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants."
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Funnily enough, Beckwith wrote, all the agencies these billionaire GOP allies are complaining about were "created to regulate some of the largest and most powerful companies in the United States and keep the economy from crashing."
Whereas DOGE "is an independent advisory panel that Musk gets to personally control, with no limits on its purview, which is not directly authorized under the Constitution or even by Congress" — ostensibly what these billionaires claim to hate, but seemingly not so much when it's run by one of their own.
And Musk's grand promises to cut $2 trillion in spending are effectively impossible unless he persuades Trump to break his longstanding promises and make cuts to Social Security and Medicare — which there is no clear mandate for any elected official to do.
"Nothing in the Constitution bars Trump from asking for advice from a commission, even if the people staffing it seem ill-equipped for the task," concluded Beckwith.
"But by the same token, there was never anything wrong with federal workers writing regulations based on laws passed by Congress, or with the president and Congress working together to create an agency that’s free from day-to-day political meddling, or with judges and other unelected officials making decisions. ... If you only object to the rules when you aren’t in power, then you aren’t really objecting to the rules at all; you’re objecting to not being in power."
