Trump, Musk have opened the door to chaos

They are both breaking the law with impunity and until they recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution and are broken to the rules-based order of this country, there should be zero negotiation with them - on the budget, on legislation on anything.

Trump and Musk and indeed many Americans see our national government as a wasteful, bloated and possibly corrupt business enterprise that needs to be reduced and restructured. I understand. But they cannot, must not, be allowed to use illegal means to achieve these ends.

Over the past month, Trump and Musk have taken a series of illegal actions to fire and offer “buyouts” to civil servants, shut down federal agencies and federal programs, including firing a number of inspectors general, summarily stopping payments to local aid recipients, and shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On Friday night, they announced to universities around the country that the federal government will summarily and arbitrarily be cutting the indirect costs for clinical research. Every single one of these actions has been subject to significant legal challenge as they purposely seek to overwhelm the courts with lawsuits, and in some cases, ignore the court orders to stop their illegal actions.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

I have no problem giving all of these programs a good hard look and even cutting or restructuring them, but if there is one thing clear in our Constitution, it is that Congress has the power of the purse and Congress makes the laws. And if there is one thing that underpins our entire economy, our freedom, our way of life, it is the sanctity of contracts and the respect for democratically determined laws.

Trump and Musk are misunderstanding something very important about what government actually is. Government itself is the rules of the game. It is the rules that enforce contracts; it is the rules that keep us from harming one another; it is the rules about how we make the rules and enforce them and settle conflicts. And it is at heart, faith-based.

We have faith that when Congress passes a law, everyone recognizes that this is something binding; we have faith that the executive will faithfully execute the law that Congress passes, and we have faith that the U.S. Supreme Court will fairly resolve conflicts between law and the U.S. Constitution, and the President will abide by the law as determined by the Supreme Court.

Now Donald Trump, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, are systematically and at scale, acting as though laws no longer apply and by extension, Congress no longer matters.

What happens when Congress passes a law but it no longer has any force of law because the executive doesn’t recognize it? It breaks the faith in our institutions, and this has repercussions well beyond arbitrarily shutting down a couple of agencies or illegally cutting programs.

Because if Congress and the laws it passes doesn’t matter anymore, what then is the law that we are operating under?

If the law is whatever Trump and Musk say it is – then there is in fact no “law” at all, and the faith that underpins every aspect of our lives, our economy, and our national security starts to crumble.

Let me just spin out some possibilities:

This country is $36 trillion in debt. The interest we are paying on this debt now is greater than what we spend on our national defense and on Medicare. We depend on people in this country and around the world to buy U.S. Treasury bonds to keep financing our government. And we can do this cheaply because everyone has faith that the United States of America will honor its commitments and follow the rule of law.

But if the executive can break the law with impunity, then how does a business, or a contractor, or someone who, say, buys government treasuries and finances the massive debt of this country, determine whether a contract with the United States government will be honored on time and in full?

Even if our creditors are merely uneasy about whether we will honor our commitments and start asking for higher rates of return to justify the increased risk, we could quickly be caught in a catastrophic debt spiral where payments on interest squeeze out every other priority: national defense, Medicare, Social Security, care for our veterans, infrastructure. We are dangerously vulnerable.

If the law established by Congress is not really the law, then what are the rules for the military? If the law established by Congress is not really the law, why should any of us pay our taxes?

These scenarios are not some abstraction. They are in fact what happens in countries all around the world where a government itself is perceived as illegitimate and corrupt and there is no firm rule of law.

The idea that Trump and Musk are taking extreme action to “balance the budget” is risible. Trump is demanding that Congress pass $5 trillion to $10 trillion in debt financed tax cuts. Musk’s “efficiencies” are not even coming close to covering this, much less actually closing our gaping deficit hole. Almost every state in this nation passes a budget that is balanced and passed on time, sometimes under extraordinary fiscal stress. And they don’t need to burn their laws and institutions to the ground to do it.

In this moment, all leaders, regardless of party, should treat this as the dangerous moment that it truly is. There should be no budget negotiations - or negotiations of any kind about any subject - there should be no government business done whatsoever until Trump, Musk and their followers put back what they have broken and establish that they will abide by the Constitution of the United States of America.

We are all depending on it.