Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
Elections certainly have consequences, and I wish acting outside constitutional scope had consequences, too. (maybe this specific issue is within scope or there is a reasonable question about it, but so many other issues seem unreasonably out of scope, IMHO)
i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
But he was elected, which qualifies him. The voters voted for this sort of thing. Not in the exact details, but that's why it's a representative democracy instead of a direct one.
I'd like to see them all rounded up and put in prison indefinitely. Denied bail and left there while their crimes are documented. Everybody connected to DOGE should be in prison, all the way up to Elon.
Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.
There's something about the trick of abusing a process set up to hire temporary staff quickly for overseas disasters and pandemics to take over and destroy a government department you don't like that feels LLM-like to me.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
It will be interesting to see whether in the next Admin/Congress , if Democrat, will investigate and declare these actions unlawful (done without Congressional approval) and whether a new DOJ will investigate the individuals like this DOGE dude as having broken the law for operating outside their authority because the proper procedures weren’t followed. It’s going to be interesting to see whether/who winds up in jail.
DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency. Also focusing on where majority of spending occurs where we could get biggest bang for the improved efficiency. After this good luck selling someone on another round of efficiency improvements.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.
Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.
Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
This type of strategy is almost the only way to get rid of these kinds of agencies. You'd end up with a million raodblocks being tossed up if you tried it any other way.
Right, because there shouldn't be any roadblocks when you're taking an action that has a high probability of resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying.
Love to see HN political bot comment graph like if and when there was a surge of them over time (US elections or other countries elections). Like did the Ukraine blowing up Yandex's data center(s) have any effect?
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
> But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules.
It's not even established that he has the power. The fact that they do something doesn't mean they have that power.
And given that, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore all other rules.
> You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no?
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
Are you calling congress "HR"? Congress created USAID, and did not approve it being destroyed.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
Only Congress had the power. But Congress didn’t call the Executive branch on it, so … here we are.
That’s not quite accurate. While Congress didn’t abolish USAID, it did enact appropriations bills that transferred the funding to the State Department. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779
USAID still exists on paper. But under the current appropriations bills, the funding is allocated to the State Department.
That bill was never passed into law.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...
It was incorporated into the consolidated 2026 appropriations bill that was enacted: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr4779
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was an bill rescinding already appropriated 2025 USAID funding in July 2025: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
That is not true. Funds are not allocated "for the State department". There is a statutory purpose for every allocated dollar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261784#50265886
As I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
[1] - http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF
[2] - https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/Division%20F%2...
But in mid-2025 there was a bill that rescinded already appropriated funds: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
And for 2026 the appropriations bills allocated the money directly to the state department.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
Elections certainly have consequences, and I wish acting outside constitutional scope had consequences, too. (maybe this specific issue is within scope or there is a reasonable question about it, but so many other issues seem unreasonably out of scope, IMHO)
Hopefully "treason has consequences" will be the meme in 2029.
i for one am pretty exhausted by "elections have consequences" being codeword for all previous rules systems norms obligations and institutions are totally ok to be thrown in the hopper. it's an exhausting and ridiculous shrug of the shoulder that in no way meets the moment, that is just the laziest "what can you do" nothing.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
If you vote to throw the rules in the hopper the rules will be thrown in the hopper. That's just how it works.
The US is hardly alone in this. The UK voted to shoot themselves in the face, because brown people are scary.
Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.
It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".
But he was elected, which qualifies him. The voters voted for this sort of thing. Not in the exact details, but that's why it's a representative democracy instead of a direct one.
Trumps not 28.
But also the voters voted for Trump to execute the laws passed by Congress. Which law said get rid of USAID?
The appropriations bills that remove any mention of USAID and redirect the funding to the state department: https://www.ghtcoalition.org/blog/house-appropriators-advanc...
USAID still exists on paper, but Congress hasn’t appropriated any funding for it.
I'll also add, which law said create DOGE?
They voted for Trump specifically because he would not just follow common practice and would actually shake things up.
Did his actions exceed the authority granted to the executive branch which employed him?
Spending is supposed to be decided by congress not the executive branch so quite obviously yes.
Budget allocation, and managing authority are different things, though.
That is true, but its also true that impoundment is a crime.
So that means congress exercised their authority to check and balance the executive and everything turned out ok?
If there's no record, was the executive really employing him?
When things get allegedly autopenned under Biden's administration: THE PRESIDENT'S AUTHORITY IS BEING HIJACKED!
When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.
Are we going to prosecute these people or what?
they are, at best, woefully corrupt and abusive.
they are, in all likelihood, foreign agents or acting on behalf of them.
I suspect only if the election goes drastically against the current administration.
I'd like to see them all rounded up and put in prison indefinitely. Denied bail and left there while their crimes are documented. Everybody connected to DOGE should be in prison, all the way up to Elon.
Democrats are to timid to deliver any form of justice, that is of course assuming elections will happen at all.
Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.
One can hope. The tide seems to be turning with Trump becoming toxic to a majority of voters.
If the GOP loses big in the midterms, we might finally see MAGA and the GOP turn on each other in an internecine frenzy.
Laws mean nothing if there’s no will to enforce them. Remember Biden opened the border and let millions of illegals in without passing a single law.
If border control let them in, they're not "illegals." (Nor did they illegally overstay a visa, since they were given legal status to stay.)
There's something about the trick of abusing a process set up to hire temporary staff quickly for overseas disasters and pandemics to take over and destroy a government department you don't like that feels LLM-like to me.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
So who issued his paychecks?
That will become a point in a court...
It will be interesting to see whether in the next Admin/Congress , if Democrat, will investigate and declare these actions unlawful (done without Congressional approval) and whether a new DOJ will investigate the individuals like this DOGE dude as having broken the law for operating outside their authority because the proper procedures weren’t followed. It’s going to be interesting to see whether/who winds up in jail.
DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency. Also focusing on where majority of spending occurs where we could get biggest bang for the improved efficiency. After this good luck selling someone on another round of efficiency improvements.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
No. A bunch of kids are not going to be able to come in and improve a system they do not understand the least. Government can be improved, but its not a 1 or 2 year program, it will need deep, proper understanding. There is no lack of "smarts", these kids have nothing to contribute. There is lack of time and mandate.
Chesterton's Fence is no joke.
DOGE was created to kill brown babies.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
> DOGE was such a missed opportunity. If only they could use their smarts to actually improve government efficiency.
I used to think that, but given how things unfolded I'm pretty convinced it was never intended to be anything more than a slash-and-burn purge of "DEI" and "disloyal" gov employees combined with a taxpayer-data-heist.
Interesting to see how USAID in the title is like the bat signal for scumbags
Huh? Can you elaborate?
Certain political topics bring out bots and narrative-pushing. It's very obvious with certain topics.
Just the deaths of hundreds of thousands, nothing to see here.
To save 0.3% of the budget.
That 28 year old is responsible for around the same number of deaths as the Rwandan genocide. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=proj...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years, similar to secrets of the CIA coming out in the 1970s. Wish politicians in US weren’t so spineless about going after them.
> We’ll be reading about the crimes of dodge for years
I know their tendancy to have wiring faults could certainly stand to be improved but jeez, that's a bit harsh
Its the curse of the two-party system. Politicians are not risking splitting from their party, because that would mean the end of their political career.
Hopefully the midterms results in massive investigations of Trump and everyone in his orbit, but if we get “we all need to come together” faux-centrism I wouldn’t be surprised.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
This type of strategy is almost the only way to get rid of these kinds of agencies. You'd end up with a million raodblocks being tossed up if you tried it any other way.
Right, because there shouldn't be any roadblocks when you're taking an action that has a high probability of resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying.
Congress can and should pass a law to dismantle an agency they created. There is no real roadblock once that is done.
omg have the political bots been directed at Hacker News. WTH?
this has been going on for ages, mate.
HN doesn't have the kind of filters that the big social media platforms do, either.
HN has plenty of filters, just not those ones. Detected LLM writing is automatically flagged, and they do something with IP address too.
Love to see HN political bot comment graph like if and when there was a surge of them over time (US elections or other countries elections). Like did the Ukraine blowing up Yandex's data center(s) have any effect?
Have been for years.