Man, libertarians are a difficult bunch. Give them a government agency tasked with “delet[ing] entire agencies,” and they’ll start yowling about the agency-deleting agency.
The zanier version of John Galt has been set loose on the permanent bureaucracy, invoking Milton Friedman while he throws the US Agency for International Development (USAID) “into the woodchipper.” Yet rather than welcoming the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a lot of libertarians are filled with dread:
- Is DOGE “just the Deep State by a different name?”
- Or is it a modern-day CREEP, Nixon’s dirty-tricks-campaign operation, “on steroids”?
- Does Elon Musk think he’s “Dictator of America”? What he’s doing “bears all the hallmarks of a coup d’état”!
“You just can’t please these people,” I can hear our critics on the right saying, “It’s the Movement that Would Not Take Yes for an Answer.” But I like to think DOGE skepticism comes from a good place: Libertarians take “eternal vigilance” really seriously.
Even so, I am unconvinced—to put it mildly—that the agency-for-eliminating-unconstitutional-agencies is a serious threat to constitutional government. DOGE’s legal defects are a far bigger threat to the agency’s bureaucracy-slashing mission than they are to our liberties. And since a lot more than USAID deserves to go into the woodchipper, libertarians should want those defects cured because we want DOGE’s mission to succeed.
The Stuff of Libertarian Nightmares?
Be careful what you wish for, Veronique de Rugy cautions in Reason. When one president “circumvents legal constraints to impose libertarian-leaning policies,” the next can use “the same unchecked powers to expand government.” In the worst case, DOGE could leave us with a “presidency on steroids,” “opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.”
That’s sound advice in general, but in this particular case, I’m struggling to come up with true nightmare scenarios.
There are three main areas where DOGE might further weaken the remaining constraints on executive power:
- Impoundment: The administration insists the “power of the pen” trumps Congress’s power of the purse, and the president can simply nullify appropriations he doesn’t like.
- Bypassing Senate confirmation: They’ve also played fast and loose with Musk’s legal status, arguably flouting the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.
- Expanded removal powers: And they’ve claimed sweeping authority to pink-slip federal employees en masse, civil-service protections notwithstanding.
Which of these moves, if successful, would spell doomsday for libertarians when “the left is in power”?
Is the big threat here impoundment? Beware, lest come 2029, President Gavin Newsom starts zeroing out all the agencies libertarians like? (NASA geeks and “state capacity libertarians” hardest hit).
Is it bypassing the Senate? Will Newsom govern through unconfirmed apparatchiks? What if he enthrones a “pay czar” to determine CEO salaries or a “car czar” who calls the shots for US auto manufacturers?
Or is it the threat to federal civil-service laws that’s supposed to keep libertarians up at night? If Trump’s “Schedule F” gambit succeeds, will President Newsom pack the commanding heights of the administrative state with Democratic loyalists?
He could, I guess. I doubt we’d notice the difference. In the 2024 cycle, 84 percent of federal employees’ campaign contributions went to Harris-Walz—99 percent of EPA donations, 100 percent at the Department of Education. Americans are already governed by a bureaucratic class well to the left of the median voter.
Are there risks to Musk’s berserker approach? Sure, but given where we are now, catastrophizing about DOGE is a little like telling Javier Milei to slow down because his successor might be a Peronist.
To be fair, I think impoundment is a power grab worth worrying about—but not because I fear a future president may cut too much (don’t threaten me with an imaginary good time). Instead, the risk is that presidents will use budget-slashing authority to punish legislators who don’t fall into line—further accelerating our slide toward one-man rule.
The other two issues—Musk’s slippery constitutional status and the push for greater authority to fire bureaucrats—cause me far less agita, for reasons I’ll explain below.
What Is Elon Musk?
Trump’s legal team has proved comically incapable of a straight answer to that question. “I don’t have any information beyond he’s a close adviser to the president,” an administration lawyer burbled in a DC district court hearing last month. But he’s definitely not the DOGE administrator—that’s somebody named Amy Gleason.
If a federal officer exercises “significant authority,” he’s supposed to go through the constitutional appointments process; for “principal officers,” that means getting confirmed by the Senate. Musk hasn’t been, to the consternation of multiple federal judges.
The constitutional formalities matter; still, in this case you might have a hard time explaining to a normal person how skirting them has made Musk uniquely dangerous: “What do you mean he’s not under democratic control? He works for the president. Trump can overrule anything he does and fire him at any time.”
And is Musk exercising “significant authority” in the constitutional sense: making final decisions that bind the government? The legal scholar Michael McConnell argues that he’s basically another executive-branch “czar” with “no line authority but a great deal of influence.” DOGE’s power “is simply to make recommendations to the agency”—a point that seems to have been impressed on Musk at a contentious Cabinet meeting on March 6.
Either way, it seems to me that the best reason to follow the formalities is that it would put DOGE on sounder legal footing and help ensure that the cuts and the firings stick.
“You’re Fired”
Then there’s the administration’s bid for expanded removal authority: Trump’s “Schedule F” order authorizes stripping civil-service protections from thousands of senior executive-branch officials and shifting them to employment-at-will.
Proponents of Unitary Executive Theory insist that’s perfectly constitutional: Federal civil service laws can’t “limit the president’s power to remove policymaking officials” without encroaching on core Article II authority. And while Unitarians have made all manner of extravagant claims about the scope of “the executive power,” their narrowest and most defensible position is that Article II makes the president the boss of the executive branch, with the power to fire anyone using their borrowed authority in ways he disapproves.
Still, you don’t even have to reach the constitutional question if, as my colleague Bob Levy suggests, Trump already has statutory authority to make the change. “The president’s legal argument seems well-grounded,” Bob writes: “The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 exempts positions ‘determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.’” Likewise, Trump’s bid for “the restoration of presidential authority over so-called independent agencies … seems consistent with our tripartite constitutional plan.”
That these moves are legally defensible doesn’t mean they’re risk-free. Even the narrower versions of Unitary Executive Theory offer presidents broad latitude for mischief.
But the biggest risks of “a presidency on steroids” aren’t coming from DOGE. Trump’s initial flurry of executive orders includes several that assert a George W. Bush–style royal prerogative to ignore or rewrite the law. Another order dusts off the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as authority for summary deportations and, apparently, warrantless searches of homes. Then there’s Trump’s attempt to convert the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) into a trade-war weapon. No prior president has ever used IEEPA for across-the-board tariffs on allies and major trading partners. But that’s exactly how Trump is using it, in service of “the dumbest trade war in history.” If, amid the excesses of George W. Bush’s “Terror Presidency,” libertarians spent their time fretting about whether Dick Cheney’s National Energy Task Force was FACA-compliant, you’d worry they’d lost the plot.
It’s Illegality All the Way Down
To put things in perspective, look at the agencies DOGE has gone after hardest: USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Education.
They’re all unconstitutional. Some, like CFBP, wield lawmaking powers Congress has no business delegating; others, like the Department of Education, commandeer responsibilities the Constitution leaves to the states and the people. Not one has an enumerated power that can plausibly support it.
What’s more, they’re all agencies Cato scholars have called for shuttering, in most cases for at least three decades. FEMA has been a perennial target of Chris Edwards’ Downsizing Government project; CFPB the target of multiple Cato amicus briefs from its inception. USAID, NED, and the Department of Education were on the Institute’s hit list in the first Cato Handbook for Congress (1995), the last time Washington was forced to have a serious conversation about serious cuts.
The agencies in DOGE’s crosshairs shouldn’t exist. That doesn’t justify a by-any-means-necessary approach to eliminating them. To the contrary: Since the federal leviathan is a creature of statutory law and congressional appropriations, there’s no dismantling it without buy-in from the branch that got us into this mess.
DOGE Needs Congress
DOGE’s legal defects are fixable, but they need to be fixed by Congress. I offered one method in a recent piece for Reason: renewed reorganization authority of the sort Congress delegated to multiple presidents from 1932 to 1984. The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025, introduced last month by Sen. Mike Lee (R–UT) and Rep. James Comer (R–KY), would give the administration sweeping power to restructure and downsize the bureaucracy, subject to a fast-tracked approval vote in Congress. It would also insulate those cuts from legal challenges.
Other ideas come from Sen. Rand Paul (R‑KY), who’s said DOGE’s cuts should be “bundled into a rescission package and sent back to Congress”; and Yale Law’s Jed Rubenfeld, who argues that “Congress Can Easily Green-Light DOGE” via a single sentence approving cuts in a reconciliation bill.
Is any of this about to happen? Don’t hold your breath. Two weeks ago, when Senator Paul forced a vote on codifying DOGE’s USAID cuts, nearly half of the GOP caucus balked. Congress shows every inclination to keep kicking the can down the road, using media hyperventilation about DOGE as cover for doing nothing.
We should be clear-eyed about this: The smart money says DOGE will probably fail, leaving the permanent bureaucracy little worse for the wear. But realism shouldn’t mean fatalism. In this town, opportunities for radical cuts come maybe once a generation. Libertarians should be looking for ways to even up the odds.