The lawless legacy of DOGE

Flooding the zone. Being constantly in the news. Moving from one disturbing attack on American political traditions to another. These are tactics that the Trump administration has used to knock Americans off their feet, and make it hard to hold the government accountable. 

That includes the legacy of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, and what it did to the federal government during the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term.  

Let’s recall that DOGE went after federal agencies with abandon, instigating “purges of federal agencies with the expressed mission of rooting out fraud, waste and abuse.” One expert describes the cuts DOGE made to those agencies as “big, deep and random.” In its slash-and-burn work, DOGE paid little heed to the law, let loose by a president who himself asserted the authority to impose his agenda and priorities on executive branch agencies with or without the agreement of Congress, which created them in the first place.

One example of DOGE’s behavior was what it did to the National Endowment for the Humanities. By the time it was done, it had rescinded almost every then-active grant made by the agency during the Biden administration. Two-thirds of its staff were let go.  

On May 7, Judge Colleen McMahon of the Federal District Court in........

© The Hill