“When you see prices go up at the grocery store, the prices are going up because of excess government spending,” he said in an online conversation with, among others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “It’s very important to connect these dots. The supermarkets are not taking advantage of you. It’s not price gouging, it’s that the government spent too much.” (This, it must be said, makes no sense.)
Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.
The thing, of course, is that Musk isn’t elected. He is a private citizen. He was neither confirmed for a cabinet job nor formally appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He does not even have a presidential commission; he has been designated a “special government employee.” Musk says that he is acting on the authority of the president of the United States. Even still, it is not as if the president of the United States has the authority to unleash an unvetted, unaccountable private citizen onto some of the most sensitive data possessed by the federal government.
But that is the situation. A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States. The public has no guarantee that its most sensitive data is secure. At best, they have the personal word of Donald Trump, which, paired with a few dollars, might buy you a cup of coffee.
The only institution capable of responding to this with any alacrity is Congress. But Congress is also led by Republicans, and both the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, have declined to take any steps to arrest the president’s illegal arrogation of power or Musk’s destructive effort to run the federal government. Thune and Johnson, acting with the support of Republicans in both chambers, have, in effect, renounced their power over the purse and abnegated their powers of oversight. Their Congress is supine, submissive and subordinate, less the equal of the president than a tool of the executive branch — a subject of his will.