The many ways Elon Musk’s DODE breaks the law, explained by a lawyer professor

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency moves rapidly and breaks the law – lots of laws.

The scope of Trump and Musk’s erroneous efforts to cleanse the federal workforce and cut down government spending has shocked the political world – partly for its ambition, but also partly because of its ignoring the law.

David SuperAn administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, recently told The Washington Post That so many of Musk’s movements were “so wildly illegal” that he seemed to “play a quantity game, and to assume that the system cannot respond to all this illegality at once.”

I reached out to super so he could go through this amount of game – so he could take me on a tour of all the apparent offense in Musk’s efforts so far. A transcript of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity follows.

The legality of Musk’s use of administrative leave to sideline officials

One thing that has really hit me about the new administration’s tactics so far is this extremely aggressive use of paid administrative leave. Career officials who have resisted Dog’s demands have been quickly put on administrative leave. Then were government officials Working on Dei. Almost everyone Of the US staff, the US Agency for International Development has met this fate.

Is this a legal use of administrative leave? How does normal administrations use it?

This is very weird and probably illegal. Federal law limits administrative leave to 10 working days a year. So they deplete the cap very quickly for many of these people.

Normal administrations use what normal companies use it as a patch for a variety of problems. If anyone is accused of wrongdoing and you need time to investigate and the case is serious, administrative leave may be the solution. If anyone clearly needs some time for a compelling reason, such as big losses, and there is no way to do so with other forms of leave, this can be done. So it’s a bit of a gap filling fabric in statute and in intent and in regular use.

This makes strategic use of it on a much larger scale and there is simply no legal authority for it.

The administration also sent the e email “Fork in the Road” and said that if officials agreed to resign, they will go on administrative leave and get their full salaries until September 30. What are the legal issues there?

They give a promise that is in violation of federal law – and which has very serious consequences.

The Appropriation clause Of the Constitution says that federal money can only be used according to a grant from Congress, and Congress can limit its appropriation in a number of ways. They have limited the grant to wages to generally only 10 days administrative leave per Calendar year.

So when they promise more than that, they violate the appropriation provision. They also violate Antideficiency Act (A law prohibiting federal employees from committing funds that have not been allocated). And then, when they promise money to people last March 14, the end of the current continued decision, they also commit federal funds before a grant, which is both constitutionally and illegal.

They seem to think of it as a “hack” – they probably think shooters are legally risky, but putting them on paid administrative leave is a difficult step on it that they might get away with.

One question is whether they will actually do it. They certainly promise it. But they have also suggested that they may not be bound by contracts.

So it is very possible that people will submit to their resignation on this basis that OM (Office of Personal Management) will sign them for contracts that oblige it and then simply will not comply and will claim that they cannot legally comply because of the cap by administrative leave.

At that time, the people who were foolish enough to take this invitation can sue to try to enforce their offer. And my guess is that the courts will say, we cannot enforce the agreement that no one had any authority to do.

To claim the presidential authority for not spending money Congress adopted in the law

Okay, let’s move to expenses. We have seen an incredibly wide order for freezing of federal grants set by the courts. There have also been Musk’s team trying to block specific grants from being paid out. What are the legal issues with it?

The biggest question is that the Supreme Court steered nine to nothing That when Congress instructs money to be used, the president is obliged to do so. So it is an obstacle that will be very difficult for them to overcome.

Presidents can certainly send recommendations to Congress that funds should be reduced. ACT ACT Control ACT provides an accelerated procedure to get these recommendations considered. But the president simply does not have this unilateral authority.

The Trump administration has come up with a lot of long-term legal theories as to why they are able to do all these things. But these legal theories really come from the same place as the idea that the vice president has the power to overthrow the popular judgment in a presidential election and give the election to whom the vice president chooses. It was an absurd theory when they tried to persuade Mr. Pence to do it, and it’s been an absurd theory ever since. Still, the ideas we see emerge here come from the same very strange form of Bisarre constitutional ideas.

Trump and Musk try to dissolve USAID and move it over to the Ministry of State. This seems to be overtly defying the face of the Congress State that creates this agency, right? Is it more complicated than that?

It really isn’t. Section 6563 (A) in Section 22 Of the American code says there is a USAID. It doesn’t say there can be. It does not say, “If the President will.” It says there is A USAID. So to close it means to tread this statute.

Musk’s own appointment and the Ministry of Finance’s payment system

I will also ask about Elon Musk himself and his position in the government. The administration has said he is a special government employee, though they do not say exactly when he officially got that status. They say so It’s up to him Whether to declare a conflict of interest regarding his business, with everything he is working on. What are the legal issues here?

There are many such problems. There are a number of rules for state governments designed to keep people doing business from governments that control the purse string that affect them.

We don’t know what Mr. Musk’s status is. We do not know if he has any status at all or they are waiting to see what is happening and they are trying to give it retrospective. So we are really very lost by how all this can meet. But it seems that he is given access to information that can be extremely useful to use against his competitors. Just saying, “Well, we hope he will do the right thing about conflicts of interest,” falls far, far under the government’s obligations.

There has been a lot of reporting about Musk and his team enters the Treasury’s department’s payment systems. What are the legal red flags about it?

There are a number of them. There are very detailed requirements in federal law on who can control federal funds – who can issue payments on behalf of the federal government. In all likelihood, those involved do not qualify under these terms.

It also means that they gain access to extraordinarily sensitive private information that is covered with Privacy Act And a number of other statutes and regulations designed to protect the American people from identity theft. If reporting they have copied this information on other servers are true and these servers are hacked, so many of us could get our bank accounts emptied by the federal government.

In contrast, Mr. Musk said he identifies fake payments or illegal payments and saves the federal government 4 billion dollars a day or a huge figure of that kind. There is no reason to believe that the data in this system would provide an opportunity to tell what is legal and what is not, which leaves the fact that Mr. Musk is not authorized to make these kinds of decisions. So it seems that there is either wish thinking or something worse that is going on in how they are trying to justify this.

(Update: After this conversation, Trump -Administration accepted temporary limits on Doge’s access to the Treasury’s Payment Systems.)

Will the courts stop this?

Is there any other area of ​​obvious offense that I neglected to mention?

He has said he has the authority to abolish federal rules without undergoing the procedures required by Administrative procedure. It would basically increase the regulatory system in this country and could be very disturbing to regulated businesses. If another president decided to use the alleged power to scrape the rules, I suppose both liberals and conservatives would be very concerned about this proposal.

You told The Washington Post that you thought they were playing a “quantity game” in betting that if they openly defied a lot of laws at the same time, the system would not be able to deal with or effectively answer what they are doing . How do you think it has worked for them so far?

Financing freezing were input. Many of these other traits are illegal and are likely to be quite quickly connected.

But I think President Trump follows the statements he has made a number of times that his appointments to the Supreme Court owe him and should show him loyalty, and he believes that between his three appointed and judges Thomas and Alito he that he can have a majority willing to allow him to violate any federal law he wants.