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

Slashing staff, disabling entire agencies, the newly empowered Trump administration is lacerating the very structures of US democracy …

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 and state attorneys general.

Staff at the Federal Aviation Administration receive emails today (2/17) stating they have been fired, upending rotas during period of busy air travel and chronic qualified staff storages and impacting air travel safety.

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.

But some Democrats might envy the speed at which Trump and his team cut through red tape. After all, liberal lawmakers have for years complained about bureaucracy that moved too slowly and rules that stifled their ambitions.  One such Democrat was Joe Biden. Toward the end of his term as president, he said his administration was too slow to roll out his clean energy economy infrastructure law. “Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was,” Biden told USA Today last month. “But it didn’t have any immediate impact on people’s lives.”

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.

“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions,” the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank”, Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”

On another legal track opposing Trump and Musk’s actions, many of the nation’s 23 state Democratic attorneys general have escalated legal battles against Doge’s actions and sweeping cost cutting at treasury, USAid and other agencies.

For instance, 19 Democratic AGs sued Trump and the treasury secretary in February to halt Doge from accessing sensitive documents with details about tens of millions of Americans who get social security checks, tax refunds and other payments, arguing that Doge was violating the Administrative Procedures Act. The lawsuit prompted a New York judge on 7 February to issue a temporary order halting Doge from accessing the treasury payments system.

In response, Musk and Trump lashed out by charging judicial interference. Musk on his social media platform Twitter/X where he has more than 200 million followers charged that the judge was “corrupt” and that he “needs to be impeached NOW”.

Legal experts, AGs and top congressional Democrats say that Trump’s and Musk’s charges of improper judicial interference and some of their actions pose dangers to the rule of law and the US constitution.

This story is an excerpt from the Guardian and New York Times: 02/17/25