Does Trump's DOGE violate the Constitution?

I see a lot of hair-on-fire social media posts from my friends on the political left about the way the Trump Administration has hit the ground running, particularly the rapid moves by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to shut down questionable flows of Federal funds through the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Notwithstanding President Trump's denial of any links to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, he clearly understood the same urgency that inspired Project 2025: If you're going to be a good steward of the authority entrusted to you and the political capital you have after an election win, you have to have plans and personnel queued up long before Inauguration Day. Really, you need to start well before Election Day to draft executive orders, vet sub-cabinet political appointees, and lay out a sequence of events. That didn't happen in 2016, and opportunities were wasted as a result. There are wild-eyed claims that Trump is driven by an agenda developed by Curtis Yarvin, an online personality known as "Moldbug."

Your incoming team needs to be well versed in laws and precedents involving presidential authority, government finances. To look at it as a computer software engineer, you need to know the operating system, the kernel, system functions, the whole toolset you have at your disposal to accomplish your aims. None of this requires violating the Constitution, federal statutes, or court precedents.

A friend reposted a claim that Trump was violating the Constitution by spending money on DOGE without explicit action by Congress to appropriate money for the initiative.

DOGE (as the US DOGE Service) is just a new name of an existing office (US Digital Service) which President Obama established by Executive Order. It is under the Executive Office of the President, and presumably it is spending money that Congress has appropriated for the current fiscal year to the EOP or possibly that was directly appropriated for the USDS. I haven't been able to find any number more recent than $30 million appropriated to USDS in 2016.

An apportionment is an Office of Management and Budget (OMB)-approved plan to obligate budgeted resources. Here's an OMB document showing how the apportionment process was handled by the Obama Administration in 2016. The OMB ensures that funds are apportioned in accord with appropriations and continuing resolutions authorized by Congress. Apportionments are listed on the OMB website. Under FY 2025, under Executive Office of the President, you'll find JSON and Excel versions of apportionment requests.

I found several apportionment requests for US DOGE Service, citing 31 USC 1535 and 5 USC 3161 as authorizing legislation. The first provision allows agencies to purchase services from other agencies; the second allows funding for temporary organizations established by executive order or by statute. So presumably the USDS is using appropriated funds to pay the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization to track Federal funds and analyze spending for fraud, waste, and abuse.

When President Obama was faced with a Congress he thought would obstruct him, he said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone," and used executive actions within the discretion already authorized by law to move money and people around to pursue his priorities. There's bound to be plenty of litigation, but it appears that the Trump team is following Obama's example.

Take a close look at Executive Order establishing DOGE. Section 4(a) specifically links the US DOGE Service mission to the purpose for which US Digital Service was created -- "Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity." Section 5 carefully bounds the Executive Order so as not to override the statutory authority of OMB, agency heads, and congressional appropriation authority.

Several people on social media have mentioned Franklin D. Roosevelt as another example of a president making sweeping changes, using powers delegated by statute, without needing immediate congressional action, finding ways around the existing bureaucracy to get things done:

In addition to revamping the Supreme Court, FDR believed that he needed to reform and strengthen the Presidency, and specifically the administrative units and bureaucracy charged with implementing the chief executive's policies. During his first term, FDR quickly found that the federal bureaucracy, specifically at the Treasury and State Departments, moved too slowly for his tastes. FDR often chose to bypass these established channels, creating emergency agencies in their stead. "Why not establish a new agency to take over the new duty rather than saddle it on an old institution?" asked the President. "If it is not permanent," he continued, "we don't get bad precedents."FDR would look at other ways to increase his administrative and bureaucratic power. His 1937 plan for executive reorganization called for the President to receive six full-time executive assistants, for a single administrator to replace the three-member Civil Service Commission, for the President and his staff to assume more responsibility in budget planning, and for every executive agency to come under the control of one of the cabinet departments. The President's conservative critics pounced on the plan, seeing it as an example of FDR's imperious and power-hungry nature; Congress successfully bottled up the bill. But in 1939, Congress did pass a reorganization bill that created the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and allowed FDR to shift a number of executive agencies (including the Bureau of the Budget) to its watch. While FDR did not get the far-reaching result he sought in 1937, the 1939 legislation strengthened the Presidency immeasurably.

FDR won the 1932 election precisely because he promised to take quick and decisive action to address the Great Depression, in contrast to Herbert Hoover, who was careful to stay within precedent and norms. As the above linked article shows, FDR was a pragmatist willing to move from one experiment to another to find measures that would put Americans back to work, relieve hunger, and stabilize the financial system. (Although FDR was not an ideologue, he was steered and influenced by ideologues, including Harry Hopkins, a Soviet agent.)

After taking office in 1993, Bill Clinton fired nearly every US Attorney and the head of the FBI and replaced them with loyalists. Republicans hated it, but what's the point of an election if the newly elected officials aren't allowed to change anything? The Framers of the Constitution would not have approved of a permanent branch of government that pursues its own policy preferences unaffected by the results of an election. (They'd also object to the size and scope of the Federal government, stretching the Elastic Clause to the breaking point.)

I am old enough to have lived through several cycles in which control of Congress and control of the White House changed hands. Back when Nixon, Ford, and Reagan were president, the House was Democrat-controlled throughout, and the Senate as well, except for Reagan's first six years in office. During that period, Republicans wanted the executive branch to have more power at the expense of the legislative branch, and Democrats wanted Congress to have more power to constrain the President. When the situation was reversed under Clinton and Obama, Democrats were defending the prerogatives of the President, and Republicans were urging Congress to use the power of the purse to reign him in.

I've seen the same thing in discussions of voting systems -- caucus selection, jungle primaries, non-partisan elections, instant runoff voting. People will argue for one or the other based on whether it would have helped their preferred candidate to win or not. But that will change from year to year. Republicans love first-past-the-post when the Green Party siphons enough Leftist votes to allow the GOP to win with a plurality. The GOP loves runoffs when right-of-center voters are split among several candidates and the Leftists are united behind the Democrat.

It makes more sense not to decide matters of long-term constitutional structure on short-term advantage. If we want to talk about extra-constitutional authority, 90% of what the Federal Government spends money on is not authorized by the Constitution. The Framers intended for there to be "energy in the executive" to be able to respond quickly to emergent situations at home and abroad, but Congress has delegated far more power to the Executive Branch than the Framers would have believed to be wise. A smaller, less important Federal Government would reduce the stakes in federal elections and hopefully reduce the amount of fear and panic that is generated over the results.

DOGE meme from imgflip.com

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A friend has posted a YouTube video from the MinuteEarth channel warning: "Your Favorite YouTube Channels Might Not Survive This."

And here's the thing: Many of your favorite channels, rely, at least in part, on the kind of funding that's in danger. Here at MinuteEarth, half of our production budget last year came from partnerships with scientists at government organizations like NASA, and through government-funded universities and National Science Foundation grants. These institutions allocate a tiny amount of their budgets to outreach and communication about science, which include supporting editorially independent videos on channels like ours so we can share the important -- and awesome! -- research they are doing with curious folks around the globe.

The end of the video identifies Neptune Studios LLC as the copyright owner of the video. From MinuteEarth's partners page (which hasn't changed substantially in four years):

We help our nonprofit and university sponsors reach a large, engaged, and scientifically-minded audience. In addition to crafting traditional sponsorship messages, we often work with experts from these organizations to tell the stories in the videos themselves. Past partners include the University of Minnesota, Bill and Melinda Gates, GiveWell, and the Heising-Simons Foundation....

Many of our videos contain sponsored ending messages, in which we thank partners for their support and tell our audience about their products. We work with brands to shape engaging messages that are true to the spirit of each brand. Past successful integrations include a diverse group of consumer brands, from Audible to 23andMe to Crunchyroll....

No shame in selling your visual storytelling skills, but when "half of [y]our production budget" comes from government money, it calls into question your editorial independence. Would you ever do a video that exposes research that is unimportant -- or non-awesome! -- or shoddy, misleading, or harmful, if it makes your government clients look bad. Would you do a video on the practice of estimating temperatures for defunct climate monitoring stations? Or the influence of urbanization changes on global temperature measurement? Or the hazards of gain-of-function research? You'd figure out pretty quickly what you can and can't say in order to keep the funds flowing that allows you to keep doing what you love.