Long Live..The King?
Welcome back to Politics Explained. These past two weeks (and this first month of Donald Trump’s Presidency) have been the most eventful days we’ve ever seen. We’ve got a lot to cover including DOGE and Trump testing the limits of executive power. Let’s get started.
There’s a reason why Elon Musk, the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE*), has been referred to as “President Elon” in the past month. Musk, DOGE, and its team of 18 to mid-20-year-olds have been running through multiple government agencies (including the NIH, Federal Reserve, Environmental Protection Agency, USAID, Veterans Affairs, Defense Dept., Education Dept., Energy Dept., State Dept., Dept. of Justice, Health and Human Services, Center for Disease and Control, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Homeland Security, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), National Park Service, and more. Funding has been cut for things such as medical research, foreign aid, education, and again, much more. On top of slashes in funding have also been firings, justified by the government worker’s inefficacy, but in reality because they were recently hired and under a probationary period without as many protections to the security of their job.
While Elon and DOGE have been hard at work, the Trump Administration seems to be doing everything they can. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you may notice that it seems every five minutes there’s a new headline, all with the name “Trump” mixed somewhere in there. That’s because his administration seems to be purposefully “flooding the zone” with constant drastic actions. In this “blitz” of movement, President Trump is continually testing the limits of his executive power. Recently, Trump posted on social media, ““He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” Additionally, the official White House social media pages posted a graphic of the president donning a crown, with a label stating, “long live the king.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not this is what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.
In other news:
Trump publicly stated that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a “dictator without elections,” declaring that “[Zelensky] should have never started it.”
Senator Mitch McConnell is officially not running for re-election
Kash Patel was confirmed as head of FBI
Due to Trump and DOGE’s cuts to the FDA, the Bird Flu has run rampant across the US’s farms, driving up egg prices
*Definition of the Week (DOGE): The Department of Government Efficiency’s purpose is to carry out Trump's agenda of federal spending cuts and deregulation, and, according to the order that established it, to "modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity"
