Because Elon has the authority of the President who can override clearances.
US government was simply never designed for scenarios like this.
US government was simply never designed for scenarios like this.
The first is the obvious one. Congress is captured by a bunch of ineffectual assholes that either don't care enough to stop this or actively support ceding power to the executive.
But the second is that Congress has no actual enforcement mechanism. There are a few Congress members that are trying to stop this, but the executive can just play games with the court and lock out Congress members from any sort of oversight. If the executive refuses to abide by the laws of the country, who has control to stop it?
Three years ago J.D. Vance and others were already thinking about this and anticipating court cases:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
To quote the article: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” “And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
They've been preparing themselves to ignore judicial rulings and they may well do that.
https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-comment-questioning-court-...
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My two cents. Congress has a singular enforcement mechanism: impeachment.
If the Congress refuses? A constitution doesn't envision the government ceasing. What happens next requires a lot of imagination because it's not written in any text.
There's an example of Principate from when the Roman republic ceased and the empire began. It had the veneer of a republic, and maybe it fooled some people, I don't really know. But today it's considered an empire, not a republic, for the > 250 year period of the Principate. It was an autocracy, with an emperor. The senators were decoration.
I wonder why.
You could argue there have been 4 Republics - articles of confederation, Washington, Lincoln, FDR marking the turning point. The world has changed a lot. It feels like the time is right to rethink the federal governments scope and function and how it relates to her people and the world.
People have higher expectations of what their government should be able to do.
DOGE is usurping Congress' role.
Or it was designed such that the exutive branch may not appoint or use independent organisations or consultants to perform audits?
I dont think that is accurate.
What is extraordinary is doing so with (a) no thought to privacy or security, (b) using teenagers with no security clearances, (c) by a billionaire who seems to just be going after his enemies e.g. USAID was investigating SpaceX.
Everyone has the necessary clearance. People need to stop treating clearances like a magic totem, the executive can grant access like candy if they wish, and often does when expedient.
DC is organized around minimizing the need for a formal clearance/access process because it is slow. Between the executive carte blanche and various title authorities with their well-understood loopholes, you can often just do things.
Then why did a Federal Judge just restrain DOGE from their work because of a violation of the Privacy Act: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-and-18-states-sue-trum...
That doesn't mean doing so it can't be a problem when they do. This article is exactly why doing so is problematic and justifies the existence of the clearance process.
If they hadn't circumvented the process, the FBI would have found this information instead of Wired, and it could have been handled properly instead of in the public by the media. Going around this process opens people up to being blackmailed or extorted -- what if foreign intelligence found leverage over one of these people before our media and used it to extract government secrets? We don't even know if these people have been trained to handle classified and sensitive information. Do they even know their own rights and responsibilities?