14 states led by New Mexico are suing the Trump administration over its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Empowering an unelected billionaire to access Americans’ private data, slash funding for federal student aid, stop payments to American farmers and dismantle protections for working families is not a sign of President Trump’s strength, but his weakness,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez in a press release. “Despite his claim to be operating under a mandate from the American people, the President seems afraid to get Congressional approval for his ‘move fast and break things’ approach to the Presidency.”
Torres elected in 2022 by a decent margin of 11.6% or 74,569 over Republican Jeremy Gay. According to Discover the Networks, Torrez’s previous campaign for district attorney of Bernalillo County was bankrolled by George Soros.
As Torrez alludes to in his statement above, the general thrust of the lawsuit is that these attorneys general believe that Musk’s role as the head of DOGE violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution because he has not been confirmed by the Senate.
This is essentially the same theme as Congressional Democrats claiming DOGE is "illegal."
Sorry, no, it's not illegal. As I wrote a few weeks ago, this agency already existed and was repurposed and renamed:
If one reads the executive order creating DOGE, one finds that it's actually an already established group that's just been renamed — the United States Digital Service (USDS).The USDS was established under former President Barack Obama in 2014 to streamline and improve federal digital offerings and website. Obama created the USDS after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov to support Obamacare enrollments. The only other change beyond the name is Trump moved control of USDS from the Office of Management and Budget to the Executive Office of the President.
No employee or director of USDS under Obama was ever confirmed by the Senate; this isn't a cabinet appointment.
The state's joining Arizona are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. All of these attorneys general, including Arizona, are Democrats.
North Carolina Democratic Attorney General Jeff Jackson hasn’t joined this lawsuit - at least not as of the publication of this article. But he has already joined four other lawsuits challenging President Trump’s executive actions.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” said Torrez at the end of his press release. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th-century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st-century tech baron.”
Torrez and his colleagues arguably aren’t reading the room or checking the clocks.
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