Today’s notice: DOGE is eating congressional power, but Republicans don’t mind. Changing tunes on USAID. A chilling number of threats against lawmakers.
What’s a Little Constitutional Spat Between Friends?
Elon Musk’s march through the federal government is a helluva parade for fiscal conservatives. It’s not fun to be a conceptual ally who rains on it. “I’m hearing a lot of it on Twitter: ‘I thought you were a fiscal conservative,’” Brian Riedl, a fiscal hawk and seasoned political operative, told us Monday as his mentions got uglier and uglier.
Riedl is now at the Manhattan Institute, but his past work includes serving as a Senate aide and former adviser to Mitt Romney’s and Marco Rubio’s presidential campaigns. On Monday he joined up with a couple of other brave online conservative souls to call the Musking of USAID “a constitutional crisis.” It was not received well on the platform Musk controls.
Democrats are literally rushing to the USAID HQ in defense of the agency Congress authorized and funded (again) just recently, as NOTUS’ Katherine Swartz reported. But Republicans are less interested, and Donald Trump is loudly thwacking away at the stuff people like Riedl have had their eye on over the years, like the size of the federal workforce. Who wants to be the buzzkill at that party?
“A lot of Republican lawmakers love to attack the foreign aid budget, so defending that budget against a president of their own party may be awkward,” he told us. “But ultimately, it’s not about foreign aid, it’s about defending the constitution, the separation of powers and the role of Congress.”
Riedl told us he thinks it’s time for the GOP-controlled Congress to hold up swaths of the Trump administration agenda until the executive branch stops trying to tug the purse strings its way.
In Congress, NOTUS’ Haley Byrd Wilt, Shifra Dayak and Ben T.N. Mause report that Republicans do not seem inclined to do so.
Sen. Thom Tillis even called Musk’s work to shut down government agencies and cancel congressionally approved funding unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”
“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
—Evan McMorris-Santoro | Read the story.
The Nice Things Republicans Have Said About USAID
Since Musk called USAID “evil” and the Trump administration is shutting workers out of headquarters, we rounded up a sampling of connections Republican senators have with the agency. NOTUS gave each of these offices opportunity to comment.
- Sen. Jerry Moran penned an op-ed during Trump’s first term expressing that proposed cuts to USAID funding would “harm our long-term national security interests and reduce our leadership in the world.”
- Sen. Lindsey Graham also opposed those cuts in 2017, and back in 2016, he went on a CODEL with Tillis to Egypt to visit USAID projects. Here’s a photo of the two men in front of the Sphinx, where the agency’s groundwater-lowering activity prevented degradation.
- Sen. Todd Young sponsored the Fully Funding Our National Security Priorities Act in 2019, which says it is “imperative to empower” the State Department and USAID to “effectively advance the national security interests of the United States.”
- Sen. John Boozman sponsored the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act in 2019, which was supported by Ivanka Trump. The bill directed USAID to prioritize “gender equality and female empowerment” as it planned, designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated programs.
- Sen. John Cornyn sponsored the Preventing Future Pandemics Act of 2020, which authorized $300 million to USAID.
- Sen. Dan Sullivan is the chairman of the International Republican Institute — a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on promoting democracy worldwide — which receives funding from USAID. Three other Republican senators sit on the board of directors.
—Riley Rogerson
Front Page
- Key State Department Programs ‘Wiped Out’ After Dozens of Contractors Fired: The deep cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — which focuses on advancing democracy — is the latest way Trump is trying to slash foreign aid.
- Housing Advocates Warn That Trump Is Going to Use HUD for Mass Deportations: Housing groups are anticipating that Trump will use the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a tool to help pursue his immigration agenda.
- China’s DeepSeek AI Is Freaking Out Lawmakers, but No One Can Agree On a Response: The AI model is widely seen as a security threat, but everyone has a different idea on how to address it.
Democrats Stuck in the Slow Lane
Democrats are feeling Trump whiplash, even admitting to NOTUS that they’re off to a slow start responding to the deluge. But plenty of Democrats insist a strategy is coming together.
Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer plan to introduce legislation to block Musk and his allies’ access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. State legislatures are “armed with a powerful defense” against the president’s agenda, a DLCC spokesperson said. A coalition of state attorneys general and Democratic-aligned organizations are mounting legal challenges.
But Democrats recognize their limits.
“We had a strong week last week on pushing the so-called ‘freeze’ off,” Sen. Ron Wyden told NOTUS. “But, you know, obviously the Trump people govern by whim. They get up in the morning and they have a whim to do something, and we’ve got to run them down.”
‘Deep State’ Circles the Drain
Trump ran on draining the proverbial swamp in 2016, but as an outsider to D.C., actually eliminating the mass of career bureaucrats was easier said than done. Even MAGA-friendly Rep. Harriet Hageman told NOTUS’ Emily Kennard that Trump was “in some ways naive” during his first term about just how “embedded” they were.
This time, Trump has made clear to more than 2 million federal employees that they need to get with his agenda or get out. And in conversations with NOTUS in the opening days of his administration, House Republicans celebrated the end of the so-called “deep state.”
“His eyes are wide open this time,” Rep. Andy Biggs told NOTUS of Trump. “They terminated a bunch of careerists early on already.”
Number You Should Know
9,474
That’s the number of “concerning statements and direct threats” against U.S. lawmakers, including their staff and families, in 2024, according to U.S. Capitol Police. Lawmakers have recently raised concerns about security in the Capitol building, particularly after Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was spotted on campus.
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by … not us.
- The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover by Vittoria Elliott for Wired
- A Well-Connected NYU Parent Is Trying to Get Students Deported by Akela Lacy for The Intercept
- In Altadena, Black Households Were Most Likely to Burn, Study Finds by Adam Mahoney for Capital B
Tell Us Your Thoughts
Will Republicans try to save USAID?
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