President Donald Trump’s administration launched one of its most brazen challenges yet to Congress’s authority this week when officials led by billionaire Elon Musk gutted and threatened to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development and suggested that other agencies should brace for overhauls.
But Republican lawmakers have raised few objections about the push to ax USAID, alarming Democrats who say the GOP is ceding power to the White House.
The Founding Fathers “set up a Congress. They set up debate,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday. “And the American people, mark my words, the American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant in the executive branch.”
Even as Democrats warned of a “constitutional crisis,” it was business as usual on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as two controversial Trump nominees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, cleared Senate committee votes.
The flurry of news comes amid a frenetic couple of weeks in which GOP lawmakers have embraced Trump’s appointments, mostly swallowed their objections to Trump’s threat of steep new tariffs, and praised a blanket freeze on federal grants and loans that they had approved.
“For decades, it was nonpartisan that Congress would protect its prerogatives against the White House of any party,” said Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “But what we’re seeing now is Congress essentially surrendering all power on tariffs. They’ve long surrendered a lot of power on declaring war, and now they’re surrendering the power of the purse. There’s not going to be much of a role for Congress left.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week unveiled a plan to restructure USAID, an agency with more than 10,000 staff, “in consultation with Congress” and said “the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
The agency’s website is offline, and its headquarters closed Monday. Musk - now a “special government employee” seeking sweeping changes across government - has called the agency a “criminal organization” that needs to “die” and bragged about feeding it “into the wood chipper” in recent days. Democrats say the decision shows Trump and Musk overstepping their authority and violating the law.
“We didn’t elect a king. We elected a president, and the president needs to act according to the law, not according to his own dictates,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado).
[Elon Musk tightens grip on federal government as Democrats raise alarms]
Many Republicans have also long wanted to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been ordered by the Trump administration to stop all of its activities. The administration is also discussing an executive order to dismantle the Education Department. The draft order acknowledges that only Congress can shut down the department, but it would direct the agency to shrink itself, and Musk’s deputies are already looking for ways to cut spending.
Republicans have largely cheered on the moves - though there are a few exceptions. Some senators have said they want more information about Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which prompted the resignation of a longtime civil servant who refused to turn over the system last week. Others voiced doubts about the extent of the crackdown at USAID and said the Trump administration would not be able to abolish the agency without Congress.
“I don’t think that’s something you can do,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia), when asked whether she would be okay with the Trump administration abolishing the agency without lawmakers’ help.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said he doesn’t believe the administration is closing an agency without congressional approval, but rather reviewing how the agency is spending money.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a physician, praised its AIDS relief program credited with saving millions of lives worldwide, calling it “the epitome of soft power,” and said the halt in its work “must be reversed immediately.”
And Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chair of the Armed Services Committee, said USAID is designed to combat China’s influence around the globe. “We need an aid program to match the Chinese effort,” he told reporters. “But it needs to be done in the way that the policymakers of the United States have decided it should be done.”
But Wicker did not object to the lack of advance notification to Congress about the change. “Things are moving very fast,” he said.
Other Republicans declined to criticize Musk’s unilateral moves and echoed Trump officials’ claims that USAID has run amok. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), said in a statement he will “work closely” with Rubio to “reform” the agency - without raising any objections to being locked out of the initial decision to fold it under State.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), a constitutional lawyer, on Tuesday skirted a question about whether he believed that Trump’s executive order potentially shuttering USAID, a congressionally approved agency, is unconstitutional.
“There are executive branch agencies that the executive presumably has control over,” he said. “Now we fund the agencies, but we don’t yet know all the details on what final decision is going to be made, and what that has to do with funding and with our oversight responsibilities and all of that.”
And Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) called USAID “out of control” and said the Trump administration’s actions against the agency are “long overdue.”
“I’m glad that we’re going to take a hard look at all of these programs,” he said.
Republicans’ stance on USAID echoed their embrace last week of the Trump’s administration sudden halt to federal grants and loans. Many raised concerns privately about the funding freeze, which interrupted basic programs such as Medicaid. But in public, most GOP lawmakers framed the freeze as a welcome effort to root out waste.
Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who served on the Appropriations Committee, long the most coveted committee on Capitol Hill, said the “power of the purse” is “central to what Congress is all about.”
“When the Congress passes an appropriations bill, it’s the law,” he said. “It’s not a suggestion.”
Trump campaigned on overturning traditional limits on his ability to cancel funding appropriated by Congress, saying he should be able to use a technique called “impoundment” to reduce or eliminate spending. He and his allies have been laying the groundwork for challenging restrictions on that power in court.
“You’ve got a president who wants to consolidate power, and you have Republicans in Congress who are publicly saying they’re fine with that,” said Chris Edelson, a professor at American University with an expertise in presidential power. “And that leaves us essentially without a functioning branch of government that’s designed in part to set limits on presidential power and also to use its own power, most centrally the power of the purse that they seem to be cheerfully surrendering.”
Courts could still curtail Trump’s agenda, Edelson and others noted. A judge quickly blocked Trump’s funding freeze last week, and Democrats are hoping the courts will also intervene for USAID. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) blasted a “crime that is unfolding before our eyes.”
Some GOP senators’ skepticism of Gabbard and Kennedy - two of Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks - had raised the possibility that the pair might not advance out of committee. But Republicans approved both their nominations on Tuesday, strongly suggesting they will be approved in full floor votes next week.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said Tuesday that his GOP colleagues should think twice before forfeiting their traditional authority.
“A lot of people spend a lot of money and lot of time becoming United States senators, and I for one wouldn’t want to forfeit all the power that I just earned … and they have to remember that there will be a Democratic president,” Schatz said. “And you don’t want a Democratic president to be able to reach into a spending bill and pick and choose what they like.”
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Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.