Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” spent the first month of the second Trump presidency ransacking federal agencies — and racking up more than a dozen lawsuits challenging its structure, operations, and power.

In response, both Musk and President Donald Trump attacked judges that dare to apply legal scrutiny to DOGE and flirted with defying court orders altogether.

Simply disregarding the courts, however, would create terrible consequences for the country — according to past remarks from DOGE’s lawyer, James Burnham, who reportedly is serving as the team’s general counsel.

“If you destroy the rule of law, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Burnham said during an October panel of the Federalist Society in Washington. “And things are not going to work for anybody, including the people who are sponsoring the attacks.”

During the panel, Burnham — who worked for the first Trump administration and did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about his current role — blasted President Joe Biden for criticizing Supreme Court rulings and liberal critics for poking around the justices’ finances and social networks.

He fretted that imposing term limits for the Supreme Court could lead to the worst-case scenario.

“It’s just going to be a race to the bottom and the ultimate consequence is going to be that the political branches do not listen to the Court anymore,” he said.

“It is not hard to imagine a president who tells the Court he does not care about their opinion, which by the way is how it works in most countries,” Burnham said, musing about what a “President DeSantis or someone like that” might do in that hypothetical scenario.

Burnham dismissed the suggestion that Trump himself might jeopardize the balance of power in the American constitutional system. He even chuckled when the panel moderator predicted that, once elected, Trump “absolutely will shamelessly attack judges who defy him.”

By Burnham’s assessment, liberals’ efforts were “a thousand times more dangerous than anything that Trump has ever done vis-à-vis the court system, and I think ever would do.”

DOGE and Crony Show

Burnham has plenty of experience boosting Trump’s agenda and defending his unconstitutional tactics.

During the first Trump administration, Burnham left Jones Day, a conservative-leaning heavyweight law firm, to join........

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