The Money and the Guns

I’m Peter, and this is the inaugural post of String in a Maze. I’m a co-host on both 5-4, a podcast about the Supreme Court, and If Books Could Kill, about airport non-fiction. Those shows take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to turn around, and given how quickly news is dropping in the second Trump era, I thought a newsletter would help me (and hopefully you) keep your head above water. My plan is to put out content about every week - some free, some premium (but affordable!). 

A special thanks to everyone who helped me get this thing off the ground, and to Michael Liroff, whose ideas inspired this piece. Thanks for reading.

It’s become trendy to ask whether we’re in a constitutional crisis, and, if we’re in one, what comes next. I will give those questions my best shot. In the span of about a week Elon Musk, with the support of a team of elite DOGE incels and ostensibly at the direction of President Trump, dismantled much of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency charged with overseeing foreign aid. With the stated intent of shutting the agency down, they froze foreign aid, shuttered the organization’s D.C. headquarters, and placed employees around the globe on leave.

That this is unconstitutional is a given. USAID is an independent agency, created by an act of Congress. For Trump to dismantle it is for him to effectively poof that law out of existence. To accept it is to accept that Trump has an unfettered veto power over every law that has ever been passed. 

A similar gameplan is being run on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Trump appointed Project 2025 architect Russell Vought to oversee the agency, and Vought has initiated plans to cease work, fire employees, reject funding, and effectively wind the agency down.

Elon and his DOGE cronies also (at least briefly) gained access to the Treasury’s payment systems, giving them functional control of the flow of federal funds. The Treasury Department initially claimed DOGE had read-only access to Treasury data, but that was a lie. Elon claims that this is part of their effort to eliminate widespread fraud and corruption. He claims to want to put the Treasury on the blockchain. He claims many things. 

Whatever Elon’s plans, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” In other words, Congress can tax, and Congress can spend. Congress might delegate certain details to executive agencies, but the President (let alone some private citizen acting on the President’s authority) cannot constitutionally cut off funding allocated by Congress. What Trump and Musk appear to be doing is attempting to usurp Congress’s most significant source of power: the money.

Democrats have appeared uncertain of how to fight against this level of brazenness. David Axelrod, who rose to prominence as Barack Obama’s campaign advisor, said that Democrats publicly opposing the destruction of USAID were “walking into a trap.” Foreign aid, after all, is fairly unpopular (mostly because Americans think it’s about a quarter of our total budget when it’s actually less than 1%). We must, presumably, wait until Trump dismantles a slightly more popular independent agency. 

Axelrod is laboring under the belief that what’s happening is politics. But what’s actually happening is the raw exercise of power; it is the rejection of politics entirely. It’s part of an orchestrated effort by Trump to arrogate Congress’s power to himself. If they succeed, the separation of powers that underpins the constitutional order will have collapsed. David Axelrod can craft the perfect message for the midterm elections, usher in a blue wave, and the Democrats will take control of a Congress that has had its constitutional power pulled out from under it.

Similar to the early stages of historical fascist regimes, the existing institutions aren’t being overpowered so much as they're rolling over. Public outcry is nominal, in part because of a media ecosystem that is alternately under-resourced, complicit, and inept, and in part because most people can’t be motivated into action by the abstruse machinations of the administrative state. Congress, which stands to lose much of its power, is in GOP hands, and Republicans cannot effectively stand up to Trump because the central tenet of the modern Republican Party is that all things are subjugated to him. 

That leaves the courts, and more specifically the Supreme Court, because big constitutional issues like these don’t stay tied up in lower courts for long. This runs into two issues. First, the Court may not have as many concerns about Trump’s maneuvering as you might think. Several members of the Court (namely Thomas and Gorsuch) subscribe to the unitary executive theory - the idea that everything within the Executive Branch is the sole prerogative of the President, and many of the current power-sharing arrangements between the President and Congress are unconstitutional. They also may embrace increasingly popular right-wing legal theories endorsing impoundment - the theoretical power of the President to refuse to spend appropriated funds. 

The second problem, which I would describe as The Big One, is that Trump may ignore court orders. Both he and Musk built their fortunes off of playing games of chicken with the judicial system. Musk, for example, has spent much of the last decade openly defying the SEC. The Court’s power to stop them from hollowing out an administrative agency or seizing control of federal funds isn’t predicated on anything tangible; it relies on the widespread belief that it is real. If Trump defies them, he can will it away.

Many commentators have expressed skepticism at the idea that the administration would disregard the courts. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law Professor, wrote that Trump is “unlikely to defy a judicial decision.” I don’t have the therapy license needed to understand why someone would trust that, but regardless it’s been proven wrong already. One of the Trump administration’s first actions was a sweeping freeze of federal funds for certain grants and loans. After it was challenged in court, a federal judge ordered that the freeze be lifted. A few days later, the judge ruled that the administration had defied his order. There’s also a pending case about the administration’s failure to abide by a court's order to reinstate USAID staffers. It’s not whether they will defy court orders, it’s how often, how much, and for how long.

Somewhere beneath our Constitution's fabric, past the voting and the courts and the due process, are men with guns, purporting to maintain order when all else fails. The police, the military, ICE; they stand behind the social contract, promising to deliver violence upon anyone who violates it. You’re obligated to them because they are powerful. Their obligation to you is more tenuous, built on the shared belief that your rights are meaningful. What happens when that belief degrades?

The balance of power in our constitutional order isn’t self-executing; it’s something that must be adhered to and defended. It’s clear at this point that the Trump administration rejects out of hand the idea that it might be in some way constrained, by the Constitution or otherwise. Maybe Congress will wake up and defend its power from Trump’s incursion. Maybe Democrats will stifle him somehow, or public outcry will cow him, or the Court will stop him. But if not, if Trump and Elon Musk are allowed to take Congress’s power for themselves, then the Constitution disintegrates, and it will just be the men with guns, and we’ll be living at the whims of brute force.