There are a lot of lawsuits and a lot of moving parts. But best I can tell, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Theodore Chuang of the federal district of Maryland was the first time any judge has directly addressed the illegality of Musk’s appointment as head of DOGE and then ordered his actions unwound.
Specifically, Judge Chuang, in a
68-page preliminary injunction, blasted the illegal appointment of Musk, ruled the ensuing shutdown of USAID by DOGE illegal, and barred Musk and DOGE from any further work at USAID.
A lot has happened since Musk first took the reins at DOGE, so to understand the impact of this order—specifically what it does and does not do within USAID and how it might have ripple effects in other cases—it’s useful to go back in time to the beginning of February, when Musk and DOGE first started taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
One of the most important parts of Judge Chuang’s ruling confirms that the administration tried to have it both ways with Musk.
On the one hand, there Musk was, with DOGE members already inside of an agency, bragging about how he had destroyed it in the course of a weekend. Musk made public statements and posts claiming he had firm control over DOGE, and Trump even praised Musk for this in his joint address to Congress.
In addition to the “wood chipper” post, Judge Chuang noted that Musk wrote in February that it was time for USAID to “die” and that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down.
On the other hand, the government tried to argue that Musk was only serving in some kind of advisory rather than official role. Government attorneys have argued in many cases that Musk does not have formal authority to make government decisions, and therefore he didn’t need to have been formally appointed by Trump and officially confirmed by the Senate.
When pressed as to who was actually in charge of DOGE then, the White House
claimed last month that a woman named Amy Gleason, who worked for DOGE’s predecessor, was its acting administrator.
The fact is, the government has been DOGE-ing the truth for weeks about who was really in charge. Everyone knew and bragged that it was Elon Musk, but that actually created a legal problem because of the pesky Appointments Clause. So they apparently filed false affidavits with the courts to try and backfill the position with someone who was never in charge of it, and then they got caught.
If a president could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisors go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.
Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.
Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.
If Elon Musk is, as Judge Chuang has ruled, the effective head of DOGE, and his position and consequential actions as an effective agency head requires him to have been formally appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, then this will help other litigants in other cases put an immediate stop to what DOGE is doing currently. That could gum things up for Musk, who would suddenly lack the power to slash and burn the government using just his team of hackers.
statuskuo.substack.com
www.newsweek.com
www.yahoo.com
(Big applause from the audience!)
www.latimes.com
