‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs

[planosteve]

In slashing staff and disabling entire agencies the administration is lacerating the structures of US democracy

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general.
Trump’s fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the US government and raised fears of a threat to US democracy.

Trump and Musk have also attacked judges who have made rulings opposing several of their moves after they ended up in court, threatening at least one with impeachment and accusing him of improper interference.

“In the US, we appeal rulings we disagree with – we don’t ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment just because we don’t like the decision. This is a coup, plain and simple,” Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, said.

Trump and Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s largest single donor, now face multiple rebukes from judges and legal experts to the regulatory and staff cuts they have engineered at the treasury department, the US Agency for International Development and several other agencies.

Incongruously, as Trump has touted Musk’s cost-cutting work as vital to curbing spending abuses, one of Trump’s first moves in office last month was to fire 17 veteran agency watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose jobs have long been to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in federal departments.

Those firings were done without giving Congress the legally required 30 days’ notice and specific justifications for each one, prompting mostly Democratic outrage at Trump’s move, which he defended as due to “changing priorities”, and falsely claimed was “standard”.

In response to the firings, eight of those inspectors general filed a lawsuit against Trump and their department heads on Wednesday arguing their terminations violated federal laws designed to protect them from interference with their jobs and seeking reinstatement.

The IGs who sued included ones from the Departments of Defense, Education and Health and Human Services.

There's more. You can read the whole thing here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... tting-coup

I really think that we may be heading for impeachment. Either that or dictatorship. Or worse!

[Mark]

In slashing staff and disabling entire agencies the administration is lacerating the structures of US democracy

I read no further than this. Bureaucracy is not Democracy.

The idiots on the evil Left need to learn a few things.