Leubsdorf: The unanticipated factor

Musk resigned in 2017 from a business advisory council to protest Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2022, he said Trump was “too old” to be president, backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead. Trump said Musk “should focus instead on getting himself out of the Twitter mess,” referring to the fallout from his purchase of the social media site.

But they bonded when Musk endorsed Trump and poured millions of dollars, plus his technical expertise, into the successful Republican campaign to carry Pennsylvania. Trump named Musk and the since-departed Vivek Ramaswamy to head an ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency to help cut federal spending. But the extent of its sway was in no way evident, because the presumption was it would make recommendations to Congress.

That presumption has proven to be very wrong. Without any formal grant of authority besides Trump’s say-so, Musk has taken the president’s agenda and gone well beyond making recommendations.

So far, Trump seems to love it, the pliant Republican Congress seems acquiescent if not supportive, Democrats are critical but powerless, and the main resistance is coming from legal challenges by state attorneys general and government employee unions that may take months if not years to resolve.

For a neophyte, Musk has shown political deftness in choosing his initial targets, primarily agencies and programs that are unpopular with the public — and especially Republicans — though they constitute only a small part of the $7 trillion annual cost of the federal government.

Foreign aid, an early Musk target, totals barely 1 percent of the budget but has long been a GOP political whipping boy, though most goes to health, feeding and other do-good projects that bolster the U.S. image globally.

Also unpopular with Republicans are the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the federal bureaucracy in general.

Musk justifies his actions by contending he is acting to rid the federal government of widespread waste, fraud and abuse. And anyone who has examined the line-by-line items in the federal budget would find it hard to justify some of them.

But the savings to be gained by rooting out true abuses are less than could be achieved by modestly reforming the Social Security and Medicare entitlements systems, which account for 60 percent of all annual federal outlays.

And Musk’s unauthorized, illegal rampage through the federal bureaucracy will almost certainly do more damage than good, by defunding programs such as rural hospitals, Head Start programs and medical research, not to mention the impact of forcing out valuable nonpolitical employees with years of experience.

Because the Republican Congress seems disinclined to stop Musk and Democrats lack the votes to stop it, the federal courts are emerging as the prime hope of restraining this administration. In the process, they are reminding Trump and Musk that this is supposed to be a government of laws, not a private company where the boss can do whatever he wants.

But that assumes that an administration acting without self-restraint will obey legitimate judicial restraint.