How to Seize Power
Regime Change, Part 1
I have been extremely busy with my new project for The UnPopulist, the Executive Watch, which catalogs Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power. We just posted a roundup of most of what we’ve done so far. I recommend you take a look at it.
I was meeting with friends over the weekend, and I told one of them I was working on this, and he asked, half-jokingly, “How big is your team?” It’s only me, doing this part-time. But I could have a whole team, and we would still have work to do.
For that reason, some of the higher-level analysis I do here at The Tracinski Letter has fallen behind the specific events. Today, I want to starting defining what I can only describe as the regime change that has happened in America.
I use “regime change” in a very specific sense. A “regime” in political science refers not just to a particular group of people who are in charge, but to a whole system of government. That is what has been changing with surprising rapidity in the first two months of Trump’s return. We no longer live under the same kind of government as we did in January.
There are three big parts to this change. The one I am going to try to cover today is the fundamental that enables everything else.
To understand it, we’re going to have to strip away some of the superficial cover, and that is particularly difficult in one respect, because the superficial cover is designed specifically to bamboozle people like us.
“Government Spending-Cut Theater”
Coming as I do from a background among the small-government types, I’ve seen a lot of gloating over the sight of all the government bureaucrats being fired by Elon Musk and DOGE and complaining about losing their jobs. For people like me and for some of my friends, and probably most of my subscribers—for people who see themselves as being for small government and against an overbearing bureaucracy—we are susceptible to being misled by this misdirection. What the Trump administration is doing is billed as being about “efficiency” versus the bureaucracy. But it’s all a false cover.
To begin with, I hope you have not been fooled too much by any of that stuff about “efficiency,” because if you’ve ever worked for any kind of organization, you can recognize Elon Musk as the worst kind of boss.
Somebody summed up his approach nicely:
You’re fired.
Wait, you’re rehired.
Email us a list of things you’ve done today, wait forget it you’re fired again.
Come back, your job was important.
You’re fired. Or hired.
Come in to the office. Wait, the office has no computers, go home.
We are the Department of Government Efficiency.
That sounds about right. It will be impossible to write satire for years to come.
It’s not about saving money, either. DOGE has been running a website that supposedly lists all of their savings, and it has been just as “efficient” as everything else. They listed a savings of $50 million for canceling a contract that actually ended in 2005. Another $2 billion of savings is for a contract that was canceled in November, when Joe Biden was still president. It’s all small numbers and mostly flim-flam.
My favorite example is when Donald Trump claimed in his address to Congress that they cut out “$8 million for making mice transgender.” Reason looked at the actual grants this refers to, and the largest item is $3 million “to examine the efficacy of estrogen in treating asthma.” So I guess the DOGE people saw something about giving estrogen to mice, and they thought, “transgender!” That’s the level of careful analysis we’re dealing with.
In the meantime, at least one government agency is warning its employees about the national security risks of “foreign government and talent programs…attempting to recruit… employees who were…dismissed.” Well, maybe somebody should have thought of that.
But still, surely DOGE is cutting lots of spending, right? Of course not! Check out an interview that David French did with Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute—these are two old-fashioned “fiscal conservatives.” Riedl points out that DOGE claims cuts of $55 billion, but if you look into the details and take out the kind of errors I described above, it’s only $2 billion. (This was a few weeks ago, but I don’t think it’s changed much.) This is a fraction of one percent of the federal budget. It’s what Riedl calls “budget dust.” Here is her conclusion: “I would call what DOGE is doing ‘government spending-cut theater.’ The targets they’re going after are not where the money is.”
Meanwhile, the administration is still toying with the idea of a DOGE dividend that will give the DOGE “savings” back to the American people at the rate of $5,000 per household. But at the pace they’re going, there will be no such spending cuts. That doesn’t mean they won’t send out the checks, mind you, especially as Donald Trump becomes anxious to counteract the economic damage caused by his tariff chaos. But it won’t be savings. They will be following the time-honored tradition of buying our votes with borrowed money.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who has ever studied this problem. The money in the federal budget is not going to studies about estrogen in mice, it’s not going to foreign aid, it’s not going to any of the culture war stuff this administration is focusing on. It’s in the middle-class entitlements. It’s in Social Security and Medicare—Riedl lists all the top items, and it’s those two plus Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest on the debt. In other words, it’s all stuff that is popular and that Trump is not likely to cut off (unless DOGE does it by accident). Even a small-government radical like me, someone who has been highly critical of Social Security and thinks the design of the whole system is destructive—even I would not advocate just cutting it off cold turkey. You would have to phase it out in favor of a new system over a long time.
So like the lady said, this is all theater. But that doesn’t mean it has no point, or that there is no goal to it. The theater of “spending cuts” serves its function as a big distraction from what’s really going on. The same is true of firing government employees. This is supposed to be catnip to conservatives and small government types. And that’s something this administration specializes in: the theater of publicly being mean to people their base doesn’t like.
But being mean to bureaucrats is not the real story here. It’s the superficial window-dressing.
How to Seize Power
The actual essential behind DOGE is the assertion of direct and total control over the federal government by an unelected man with no official position in government: Elon Musk. He is asserting this control specifically for the purpose of removing institutional, procedural, and constitutional barriers to the whims of whoever wields power.
It’s not about the size of government, it’s about who controls it.
The actual purpose of DOGE is to reach into the mechanisms of every executive agency, grab hold of its two most basic functions—disbursement of funds and hiring—and concentrate them in the hands of a small cabal that is outside all government procedures and accountability.
Let me give you an example.
This is from a great Washington Post report about the inner workings of the DOGE takeover of USAID. Again, this is not serious budget cutting, because the whole agency is less than one-half of one percent of the budget. But here’s the detail that’s shows you what this is actually about.
Two very young guys, the “DOGE bros,” as they were actually called, fired all the top managers and demanded sole access to the USAID payment system. Here’s what happened next:
[Secretary of State Marco] Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs—such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa—would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.
Notice what is happening here. These payments are ordered by the Secretary of State, the person who is actually, constitutionally, in charge. They’re backed by the White House, again, the people constitutionally in charge. But this small clique, outside any of the organization of government, acting on the orders of someone with no official position at all—the government won’t even admit Musk is in charge of DOGE—overrides their orders.
That is a coup. We are in a revolutionary moment, and it’s moving so fast most people haven’t registered yet that it has happened.
There’s a theory that provides a sort of constitutional fig leaf for this, the theory of the so-called “unitary executive.” This is the idea that the executive branch is an elected autocracy, a system of one-man rule in which the president’s whims do not have to go through constitutional officers like the Secretary of State and are not subject either to laws passed by Congress or to review by the courts.
This is pretty obviously wrong and is incompatible with multiple provisions of the Constitution, not least the “advice and consent” clause, which the unitary executive renders meaningless. What’s the point of requiring congressional support for cabinet officers if they have no authority? I’ll discuss this more in the future, because it is going to be tested in the Supreme Court. But notice that in practice the implementation of this theory is not even unitary. Right now, we have two-man rule. Trump mostly controls foreign policy and is asserting his control over law enforcement. (More on that in my next update.) But Musk controls anything relating to spending.
Yet that is the most important control of all. When Trump was re-elected, a lot of us took comfort in the idea that he has the will to become a dictator but not the discipline. That’s what his first term was like. Trump does not get into the details. He likes to talk on the television and make sweeping ALL CAPS pronouncements on social media, but he doesn’t have patience for the nitty gritty of implementation.
Elon Musk is not as much of an engineer as his PR would have you think. But he and his DOGE underlings understand enough about how systems work to know where the critical points are, and they have the manic energy to go after them in a focused and unrelenting way. They realized that the strategic point to grab control of is the federal payment system. If you control that, you control everything. This is the key point they have seized.
At whose expense is DOGE exercising this power? Well, partly at the expense of Trump’s authority, which he has willingly sloughed off to his partner. And through the theater of firing government employees, they would have you believe they are exercising power at the expense of the bureaucracy. You just can’t trust those park rangers.
But they are actually seizing power from Congress.
Do the People Govern?
Congress is supposed to control the executive branch by passing laws setting its budget, creating or dissolving agencies, dictating the purposes the executive may pursue and the legitimate scope of its power. But this is the power that Musk has been exercising, instead—particularly the power to dissolve agencies, such as USAID and the Institute of Peace, that were created by Congress.
This is not a coup against the bureaucracy. That’s the window-dressing. It’s a coup against Congress.
Here’s an example. During the middle of all of this, Elon Musk visited with members of Congress, who complained about DOGE cutting funding to programs in their districts. His response to was to give them his phone number and essentially set up a hotline so members of Congress can call and ask him to restore funding for their pet programs. This is funding that was already mandated by Congress in the first place—but now they have to beg Musk not to cut it off.
Of course, you can easily guess the next step. Congressmen who cooperate—particularly Republicans—can get “Elon relief.” Congressmen who are not so cooperative will see their districts suffer. As I put it in one of my Executive Watch entries, “The executive branch is supposed to have to beg Congress for money—but now it’s the other way around.”
It is hard to overstate how important this is. In Property and Freedom, an excellent history of the connection between economic liberty and political freedom, Richard Pipes described how a central theme of English political history is the king’s need to keep returning to Parliament to ask for money for his various profligate undertakings. Parliament’s consistent policy over centuries was to trade that tax money for more parliamentary power and greater protections for private rights—until the Glorious Revolution of 1689, when power tipped decisively toward Parliament and it was they who simply put the king on a salary.
I am particularly reminded of one key part of that conflict, which was a controversy over “ship money,” a tax on maritime trading ports to support the building of warships. It was the only tax the king could levy without Parliament, and Charles I kept scheming to expand it so he would not have to seek the legislature’s approval for his spending or his policies. This was one of the grievances that led Parliament to overthrow and execute Charles.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons Donald Trump loves tariffs. For 95 years, Congress has surrendered tariff policy to the executive, so this is a form of taxation he can raise and lower at will, directing it at his enemies and sparing his friends. The constant, erratic changes in his tariff policy, I am convinced, are partly just Trump enjoying the sense of the unrestrained exercise of his whims. Perhaps he needs to be reminded that Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell—and he may profit by their example.
The point is that the power of the purse is how Congress governs, and if it does not have that power, it has no power. In the ratifying debates in New York, Alexander Hamilton explained the role of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to have the ability to originate all revenue bills: “Here, sir, the people govern: Here they act by their immediate representatives.” If Congress no longer has the power of the purse, then the people no longer govern. Our chosen representatives no longer decide what the government is empowered to do—and they have no way to either restrain or compel the executive.
By seizing the direct mechanisms of government payment and putting them under the control of his clique—ostensibly on behalf of Donald Trump—Elon Musk has literally transformed our system of government. Yes, the excessive growth of executive power has been a long process, with many encroachments under many presidents over more than a century. But Musk delivered the final blow and tipped us over the edge.
The system of government we now have is dictatorship. I don’t mean that in the loose sense it is often used, as an emotionally charged term for something vaguely bad and oppressive. I use it to refer to something bad and oppressive in a technically exact sense: a system in which decisions are made by one man, unchecked by laws or by any other power center or institution. This is what we have seen playing out day after day in the DOGE attacks on the independence and even the very existence of agencies created by Congress and in the canceling of congressionally mandated funds and programs.
The legislature now waits on the pleasure of the executive, until the last remnants of the old republic will be swept away.
No, all of the ingredients of dictatorship are not here yet, just this central one. But the administration is working on the rest. I said at the beginning that there were three stages. This is the first. The final stage is Trump’s attempt to eliminate the courts and the legal system as checks on his power, and I will be describing that soon.
The middle step is his assertion of the unchecked power to arrest and imprison—a power he is testing and expanding by way of the cruel mass deportation of immigrants. That is what I will cover in my next follow-up.
But it is important to recognize the big picture. This is not ordinary politics but a process of regime change. We now live under a fundamentally different system of government than we did before—until we demand to change it back.
Yes, it is a coup against Congress, but one that Congress is enthusiastically embracing. The most chilling moment of Trump's State of the Union address is when he said (paraphrasing) “We don't need new legislation. As it turns out all we needed was a new president.” This drew cheers and a standing ovation from the Republican members of Congress. They were cheering making themselves irrelevant. Images of the Reichstag voting to dissolve itself ran through my mind.
Another point about Trump’s power, manifested through DOGE: it stems from the broad trend over decades of the federal government funding states and innumerable private institutions like universities. This “power of the purse” is the power to control; and it is now being exercised ruthlessly.