Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla, owner of Twitter (technically now called X), and leader of the unofficial government advisory committee DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) has ordered the United States Agency for International Aid to be shut down, citing purported misuse. This has sparked intense pushback, accusations of illegality, and calls for Musk to resign as head of the DOGE.
This order is only one of many that Musk has made in the weeks since Donald Trump became our president. Musk, who up until last November’s election seemed like a relatively minor figure in Trump’s orbit has become possibly the most active member of Trump’s cabinet, seizing power by forcibly demanding that the Treasury Department give millions of Americans’ private information to DOGE, attempting to shut down billions of dollars in federal funding and grants, and replacing essentially all employees in the federal bureaucracy with young, handpicked loyalists (including one who proudly proclaimed himself a “racist before it was cool” on Twitter (now technically called X)).
Musk and Trump have justified the dissolution of USAID by claiming that it was being used almost exclusively for fraudulent purposes and DEI initiatives. One example given was that USAID was purportedly spending “100 million dollars on condoms to Hamas”. The administration seems to be not only conflating Gazan civilians and Hamas militants, and not only exaggerating the amount of money from 45’000 dollars to 100 million, a factor of 222’200% (100 million dollars in condoms would be about 90 million condoms, or ninety condoms for every one male resident of the Gaza Strip), but also either intentionally or unintentionally confusing the Gaza Strip in occupied Palestine with Gaza County in Mozambique, which is fully and entirely unrelated. The condoms shipped there cost the average American taxpayer 0.0125 cents and are part of a George W Bush era program to combat AIDS which has been estimated to have saved upwards of 25 million lives. There’s also the substantial question of whether Musk is even legally allowed to do this. One of the first clauses of the United States Constitution clearly places the power of the purse in congressional hands. When Richard Nixon tried to challenge this power in the 70s, he was struck down in the courts. Musk cancelling funds already allocated by congress is at least questionable, most likely unconstitutional, and at worst one of the most acute constitutional crises in living memory.
At the huge, still growing protest outside of USAID’s Washington headquarters, Representative Jamie Raskin (D- Maryland), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee said “Let’s call this what it is: a constitutional crisis.” Representative Ilan Omar (D- Minnesota) was even more blunt, decrying that “this is how dictatorship starts”. The administration seems to have experienced its first major pushback, and Musk has only grown more unpopular, with only 12% of Americans now supporting him having a strong role in government. Among Conservatives the number has shrunk to 26% from 47% last November. Reports have repeatedly come out that Trump is getting personally annoyed at Musk’s omnipresence.
Musk’s planned colleague Vivek Ramaswamy was let go mere hours after Trump’s inauguration. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, has insisted on not giving Musk an office in the White House. If Musk is forcing the administration to spend limited time on court battles, tanking their approval, and threatening the President’s ego, the question becomes whether he will survive this administration. Trump’s first term had by far the highest turnover rate of any President in history. A similarly powerful and attention-hungry figure, Steve Bannon, was fired only seven months into Trump’s first term. One wonders if a similar fate will befall Mr. Musk.
