Elon Musk Has Plunged America Into a Constitutional Crisis. He Must Be Stopped.
The world’s richest man, unelected and unvetted, has taken physical control of US government departments, funding, and secrets.
We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress's most important authority, the power of the purse.
Over the years, many people have tried to envision what a constitutional crisis in the United States might look like. But this scenario is so extreme that no one could have possibly envisioned it. Most of those imagined crises have involved a standoff between two equal branches of government. Instead, what has happened is that a third party – the world's wealthiest man – has sought to simply commandeer, with the acquiescence of the president, the technical systems that make the federal government function. In doing so, he has interposed himself between Congress and the control panels of government.
An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.
But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government's own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they're used. Congress's authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.
Until now.
Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Suddenly this entire system seems to have been changed. No announcement was made. No formal authority was handed over. Instead, behind closed doors, Trump cronies gave access to the government's money disbursement systems to a completely unaccountable private citizen. At the moment, the full extent of Musk’s control over these systems is unclear. But if he retains his access, regardless of what spending Congress negotiates, Musk can overrule them, by turning money on and off. For instance, Musk could unilaterally institute Trump’s currently-enjoined federal funding freeze, simply by blocking payments from being made.
We have a government of checks and balances. But because Elon Musk is unelected, and not even formally part of the government, he is totally independent of those checks and balances. There is no semblance of process or procedure. Musk appears to be having his cronies (completely anonymous, in many cases) trawl through government data (that they're not supposed to have access to) and identify random items they dislike. If Musk thinks it sounds sketchy or wasteful, he announces his intent to flip off the money flow. He then congratulates himself on X for "cutting costs."
Indeed, much of this disaster is playing out publicly, on X. Musk enjoys talking about what he's doing, holding court, and granting fiscal favors to supplicants. If a Trump-aligned figure asks for funding to be shut off, maybe he'll agree and do it.
Musk tweeted a horrifying example early Sunday morning, when Michael Flynn – Donald Trump's disgraced, former national security adviser and current MAGA conspiracy theorist who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was later pardoned by Trump – publicly flagged, on X, something he found suspicious. Flynn had identified millions of dollars of disbursements to "Lutheran Social Services." Flynn claimed this was illegal religious spending, but his actual concern is likely that a number of those services had "immigrant" or "refugee" in the name.
Musk responded. He deemed his supplicant's claim worthy, and informed Flynn that he was "rapidly shutting down these illegal payments." Musk was positioning himself as judge, jury, and executioner: in his head, he gets to decide whether the spending was illegal, and if so, directly enforce the funding freeze.
But in reality, Musk knows nothing about the systems he's interfering in. Lutheran Social Services, far from being some kind of fraud, is a major provider of vital services like senior living. Moreover, the determination that Lutheran Social Services should be funded by the government can only be made by Congress and courts, in accordance with the Constitution.
In effect, Musk had effectively appointed himself an autocrat – the absolute authority in control of American spending, for no other reason than being the president's largest financier. And he is governing primarily through – and for – the approval of his fans, on his self-owned social media site.
The crisis is extraordinary and getting worse. Setting aside even the unthinkable usurpation of congressional authority, Musk's recklessness endangers the basic stability of the government. He claims to intend to cut $4 billion a day from the government. This suggests that he would cut over a trillion dollars a year, easily enough to endanger core government functions. Worse still, he seems to be ripping money out at random – or for actively malicious reasons – without any real knowledge of the systems he's destroying. The US government is, financially, the largest entity on Earth. It is complex, far beyond any one individual's ability to understand. Musk has jumped into the role of dictator with his typical arrogance. He is, as ever, certain he understands and can improve any system within minutes, by dint of being smarter than anyone else. He is certain to wreak untold havoc, with real people suffering.
Beyond all this lies even worse scenarios. The payment systems Musk is meddling with manage the US government's debt service. Interest and principal on this debt represent trillions of dollars of spending that must go out on time, or the government enters default. If the US government defaults, the world economy may well collapse. With Elon Musk in the control room, haphazardly flipping switches, it’s not difficult to see him triggering an accidental economic apocalypse by freezing up funds that needed to go out the door.
We Can’t Surrender
What is to be done? At this stage it seems there is no avoiding the constitutional crisis – it is here. Musk is ignoring many legal authorities by demanding access to this data and these systems. Anyone who objects internally is put on leave or pushed out, as we've seen across the government, including at Treasury and USAID. But there is one path that puts Musk and Trump in a weaker position. A court must be induced to enjoin Musk from accessing and distributing private government data, and from commandeering funds that Congress has duly allocated. Most likely, Musk will simply ignore any such order with the same smug contempt he is currently exhibiting.
If nobody acts to stop Musk, we will have surrendered 236 years of constitutional government to him over the course of only several weeks, for no better reason than nobody being willing to confront him.
This would create a more traditional interbranch standoff, with the courts insisting that Musk follow the Constitution and Musk (and presumably, his executive branch allies) insisting that he be allowed to ignore it. But as noted above, the constitutional crisis is probably unavoidable. This pathway at least makes it more winnable. It gives Democrats and other supporters of constitutional government the strongest leg to stand on. A court order would clearly establish Musk is defying the law. Moreover, it would help solve another problem: Musk’s seizure of power has largely failed to attract notice because the arcana of government payment systems does not compel public attention. Escalating the conflict could help to quickly move it to the center of the public mind, with real, physical stakes for one of the most famous men on Earth. The battle must likely be resolved in the arena of public opinion, where Musk is unpopular and where the idea of the world’s wealthiest tycoon usurping the US Constitution is unlikely to gain much support.
Even then, victory is not guaranteed. But if nobody acts to stop Musk, we will have surrendered 236 years of constitutional government to him over the course of only several weeks, for no better reason than nobody being willing to confront him. It would be oligarchy in a sense nobody had previously imagined: rule by the rich not just because they are politically powerful, but also because the richest man on Earth literally controls the infrastructure of spending. This future is too dark to allow, and it must be prevented at all costs.
Will Stancil is a lawyer in Minnesota, working on civil rights and local government issues. Follow his writing at www.stancilculture.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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To start, call every member of the Senate Treasury Committee TODAY. Ranking member Ron Wyden, OR, is onto Musk’s illegal Treasury coup and has responded with a stern letter. But it’s time for more. How about bringing a cadre of Senators to the Treasury armed with your cell phone cameras and showing the nation what is happening? Bring the press! This is a national emergency. Act like it.
None of this started with Musk or Trump. It started with apathy. Voting the same, tired people in Congress. None of what is happening is a surprise. We all knew what would happen. Now we get what we deserve. Come on, Democrats! Show some spirit. Show anything.