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President Trump has empowered Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, to fire government employees, eliminate federal agencies and run roughshod over both federal law and the Constitution.

In an unparalleled delegation of executive branch authority, Trump has chosen Musk — who is at once an entrepreneur whose companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts and an open supporter of far-right political parties in Europe — to conduct a radical reconfiguration of the American government in conformity with the ideological agendas of Trump and Musk.

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The two men have at least one thing in common. Both grew up in white enclaves when racial strife was emerging. Trump was born in 1946 and grew up in the affluent Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in New York City; Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa at a time when white people still ruled the country under apartheid.

The elevation of Musk demonstrates a major reversal of Trump ideology from the angry working-class anti-elitism of his first winning campaign, in 2016, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, to the explicit privileging, this time around, of tech oligarchs — rich beyond the imagination of ordinary people — to guide government policies.

It is no easy task to grasp the scale and magnitude of Trump’s appointment of Musk to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk’s declared goal is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, government expenditures totaled $6.75 trillion in 2024.

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen,66br” Laurence Tribe, an emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry:

To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the appointments clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.

The couple and their four children who live with them had prepared for the storm, putting up water barriers and buying two paddle boards that they could perhaps use to evacuate in a worst-case scenario.

Our Constitution rebels against the idea of empowering any individual, neither elected nor officially appointed pursuant to law, with the sweeping power to control the expenditure of public funds, the hiring and firing of public officials, the deployment of public force and the organization of public agencies. This is brute dictatorship of the worst kind.

Musk and others in the Trump administration have a very different view. Musk considers what he is doing to be the embodiment of democracy in action.

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