A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There

I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.

That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.

It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.

Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.

Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.

Edit:

To add

> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.

The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.

South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.

USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.

So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?

> But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.

So the delegated authority from Rubio is what made it legal for him to shut things down? He wasn't appointed and delegated until March 18th. He started there on January 28th. Sometime around January 30th he participated in ordering the acting administrator to shut down communications systems and terminate top officials. He was working there for 7 weeks as a non-employee, non-appointee, non-delegate, forcing the hand of the administrator who is supposed to be Senate-confirmed.

Even if you fall back on his detailing from GSA, it's dated Feb 14th and is "contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of... pre-employment screening required by USAID" -- the screening he did not complete.

Do you consider shutting down the agency a special activity, distinct from working within it at any other time? It seems a strange qualification to put on. Are the requirements for staffing looser if the official intends to close the agency?

> if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide

Then he'd still be an authorized police officer, I presume. You argued based on explicitly delegated authority from the USAID administrator or cabinet official, not that being a GSA employee meant he could go to any agency without further authority. Per above, he wasn't immediately given the delegated authority, and even his detailing seems on shaky grounds.

> doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights

Well, yes, but it's also explicitly in the law that there are procedures to authorize a search, same as the law says there are procedures to change staff, spend or not spend funds, or shut down an agency. If anything, the thousands of fired USAID employees and tens of thousands of USAID beneficiaries had their individual rights impinged by the "internal reorganization" (but I admit, probably not Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.)

Why do 2/3 of the law professors quoted say he should have been Senate-confirmed? Maybe they're biased or were fed the story and reacted without much research. It's at least a flaw of the article that it doesn't clearly explain why a COO would need to be confirmed. Maybe the professors consider Rubio's delegation to be making Lewin the de facto administrator without the required confirmation.

Anyway, he probably became fully authorized on March 18th. I don't know if he actually succeeded at anything notable before then, but he was trying to shut things down and coerce the legal administrator while, at best, a provisional detailee. I think that should be as disturbingly sloppy as sending out a police officer with inadequate legal certification on file, or performing a search with only an unrecorded verbal assent from a judge. In some hand-wavy way, any of these cases are "authorized" (e.g. I presume Rubio or Trump would have approved of anything he did), but we should expect a stricter documented standard in full compliance with best-practice procedures. For 7 weeks he was below even your bar of "delegated authority from the cabinet official", let alone some experts' claims that he should have been confirmed.

P.S. I think rayiner doesn't oppose Jack Smith's appointment, but I assume anyone else defending this also supports Smith's appointment and opposes the court meddling with it... if a president doesn't need anyone's permission to staff his branch however he likes.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261784#50265886

The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.

For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.

The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.

[1] - http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF

[2] - https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/Division%20F%2...

49.8% of people voted for "this". After he disavowed Project 2025 which was a bit of a boogeyman prospect.

But, turns out, yes, he was Mr 2025. He also didn't care at all about affordability, medical costs (big promises of reproductive care access for example), or anything else. He elected himself to ally with dictators and foreign powers, to rip up and destroy the government.

We'll see but I don't think the people voted for this. And I don't think that one election entitles you to usurp the power of the purse from Congress, to use the FCC for jawboning, to use the DOJ as a puppet, to go after non-violent student protestors, to... It just goes on and on.

The people who did vote for this have been lied to by the Republican controlled media. The powell memorandum is real, and these people have been sold lies. It's almost a miracle that the truth is just so in the face of the lies that the propaganda lies sold to tear down and destroy the USA are going to be so evidently false that even huge swarths of red America won't be able to keep their head in the sand and slumber through another round of billionaire insurrection with the same ease they've supported it for for decades.

We don't get to just tear everything down because of one election.

I voted Remain, and it's not entirely fair to say that all pro-Brexiters were racist, but the racists did certainly vote that way.

The country is run by literal 90-year-olds deferring to whoever is against the other party.

He won at a time where the incumbent bias was like -10. He won the same reason Biden won in 2020; by not being the guy in charge.