According to Washington Post sources, as many as 200,000 federal government workers could lose their jobs thanks to the mass layoffs being pushed by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump and Musk's critics are responding with a variety of lawsuits, arguing that the president's moves are illegal and unconstitutional — as the president doesn't have the authority to block funding that has already been approved by Congress.
Trump and Musk, meanwhile, are calling for federal justices who block his executive orders to be impeached by Congress. But their critics, according to The Guardian's Peter Stone, maintain that the law is on Trump or DOGE's side.
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In an article published on February 17, Stone explains, "Donald Trump and Elon Musk's radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general. Trump's fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE), to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the U..S government and raised fears of a threat to U.S. democracy."
One of the Democratic legal experts who is pushing back is Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.
"In the U.S.," Mayes told The Guardian, "we appeal rulings we disagree with — we don't ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment just because we don't like the decision. This is a coup, plain and simple."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) likens Trump's firing of over a dozen inspectors general to "firing cops before you rob the bank."
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Whitehouse told The Guardian, "I think their claims that they're going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions…. It's pretty clear that what's going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways."
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Read The Guardian's full article at this link.