Courts won't 'rescue us' from draconian Trump/DOGE Cuts — here's why

During his lengthy 2025 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, March 4, President Donald Trump praised the work that SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk is doing with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump applauded the mass layoffs of federal government employees as a huge savings for taxpayers, but Democratic lawmakers in attendance weren't applauding: many of them were scowling and held up signs attacking the president's economic policies.

After the speech, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) gave a Democratic Party rebuttal. And Slotkin — in contrast to the theatrical, widely mocked approach that Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) used during her rebuttal to then-President Joe Biden's State of the Union address in 2024 — maintained a matter-of-fact tone but laid out, item by item, her criticisms of Trump's handling of the economy and the federal government.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on Wednesday morning, March 5 — the morning after Trump's speech — journalist/author Jill Lawrence warns that the Trump Administration/DOGE cuts aren't cutting pork and fat out of federal agencies, but are undermining a variety of important government functions. And she argues that federal courts, in the end, are unlikely to prevent the damage from occurring.

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The U.S. Department of Education, Lawrence laments, "could be gone before you know it."

"In fact, half the government could be gone, and the half that's left could be unrecognizable, before most people know it and anyone can do anything about it," Lawerence observes. "It's all happening at whiplash speed, with little to no transparency. Even court challenges are no match for Trump's ideological army and Elon Musk's digital SWAT team."

Lawrence points out that Judge Amy Berman Jackson recently "summed up the threat" at a hearing on the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The Barack Obama appointee warned that the CFPB could be "choked out of its very existence before I get to rule on the merits." And Lawrence fears that a variety of agencies — from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Social Security Administration — will suffer major damage.

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Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley, Lawrence notes, told The Bulwark, in early March, that he predicts the Social Security Administration will "collapse" in the next one to three months — which will bring about a major "interruption of benefits."

"In other words, Trump and Musk could outrun the rule of law, rendering it irrelevant," Lawrence explains. "You'd think the past decade would have snapped us out of the fantasy that our institutions — or, even more fantastical, the U.S. electorate — will rescue us. We're living through the ultimate test right now, and the signs are not hopeful."

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Jill Lawrence's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.