Plaintiffs suing the Trump Administration over the president’s executive orders took a devastating hit this past week, when a federal judge on Friday handed Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) a major win.
Turning down several lawsuits seeking emergency injunctions, Judge John Bates granted DOGE access to sensitive data across three major government agencies; the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Bates ruled that the newly created waste-reducing agency has a legal right to the files.
The HHS encompasses the powerful federal health agencies of CDC, FDA, NIH and NIAID. Anthony Fauci, who led the disastrous pandemic response in this country, presided over NIAID for 40 years, disbursing federal grants in the billions of dollars to scientific research projects of his choosing.
These included secret gain-of-research experiments in a lab in Wuhan, China from where Covid-19 is assumed by most experts to have originated.
With DOGE empowered to investigate the payment systems of all HHS and Labor Departments, many of the carefully guarded secrets of how billions in grant money were squandered and misspent by federal agencies are now unraveling.
As DOGE blazes ahead with its operations to expose these secrets, Democratic opponents including the powerful labor unions—who stand to lose the most from the cost-cutting measures—have been fiercely fighting back.
As a result of the Trump administration’s employee “buyouts”—termination packages offered to federal workers who voluntarily resign—the unions face the loss of millions of dollars in union dues, along with a portion of their immense clout.
They, and other Trump opponents, sued for emergency injunctions to block DOGE’s access to federal agencies’ payment files, scoring some early successes, Fox News reported.
In one of the latest legal actions, a group of attorneys general from 14 states sued the Trump Administration and DOGE last week, arguing that Trump has given Musk too much power and seeking to shut down his work of cutting government payments, employment and programs.
Even if the lawsuit succeeds, the emergency injunction it seeks is by definition temporary, lasting only a week to ten days. The judge who paused Trump’s employee resignation program, for example, has since lifted the temporary injunction and the administration’s “buyout” program continues in full swing.
In another case, a left-leaning, lower court judge had slapped a temporary injunction on one of Trump’s first executive orders upon assuming office, a directive cancelling “Birthright citizenship.” This is the government’s practice of granting automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States whose parents are in the country illegally.
That injunction now appears unlikely to withstand legal challenges, according to a NY Times op-ed headlined, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.”
The Democrats’ first legal “win” against Trump is already faltering and even the “newspaper of record” is admitting it.
The lawsuits against Trump come with a double-edged sword: while some may reach the Supreme Court which might potentially restrict the president’s executive power, the opposite is more likely to happen, legal experts say: the conservative-leaning justices could broaden and cement Trump’s interpretation of executive power into law—a nightmare scenario for Democrats.
Fabricating a Constitutional Crisis
Only a few days ago, Trump-resisters were congratulating each other over the handful of temporary restraining orders that backed their argument that President Trump was overstepping his authority, by slashing budgets that had been authorized by Congress.
The legal briefs accused Doge of “undermining Congress,” and went so far as to paint the conflict hyperbolically as a “constitutional crisis.”
Instead of retreating into legal defense mode as most people expected, the Trump Team unleashed an assault in an entirely different direction, which may circumvent the temporary injunctions and even render them irrelevant.
Few media outlets are covering the story, but one executive order from President Trump and three extraordinary press conferences from congressional allies took the administration’s efforts to expose and defund the deep state to a completely new level.
To begin with, a press conference orchestrated by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson torpedoed the Left’s strategy of trying to stoke friction between DOGE and Congress, and parlaying that conflict into a “constitutional crisis.”
As the New York Times was forced to admit, “Speaker Mike Johnson ‘Wholeheartedly’ Agrees With Trump’s Spending Cuts.”
The article said Johnson told reporters he agreed that the President could unilaterally withhold congressionally authorized payments, if they are wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive.
Johnson also pointed out that DOGE workers were better able to make decisions on government funding than members of Congress, since “the agencies have hidden some of this from us.”
The House Speaker dismissed the Democrats’ new “constitutional crisis” narrative, saying their leaders lack a clear vision and “seem rudderless.”
House Speaker Slams “Lawlessness” of the Biden Years
“They’ve latched onto this new shiny object called ‘the rule of law.’ It would be more admirable if they hadn’t spent the last four years with their heads buried in the sand while Biden literally trampled over the rule of law without objection,” House Speaker Johnson said.
“Many Democrats cheered that lawlessness,” he elaborated, citing a few examples, “…like when the Biden Administration unconstitutionally forced the middle class to pay the student loans of doctors and lawyers.”
In addition, “[the Biden administration] illegally mandated that private companies implement vaccine requirements,” Johnson pointed out. “They radically rewrote Title IX to undermine women’s rights. Those things were actually illegal. The Democratic Party cheered it on; they didn’t oppose it at all.”
Johnson went on to endorse DOGE, recounting his recent meeting with director Elon Musk.
“I met with Elon yesterday to get an update. To me, it is very exciting what they’re able to do,” he said. “What Elon and the DOGE effort are doing right now is what Congress has been unable to do in recent years, because the agencies have hidden some of this from us.”
“DOGE is uncovering things that we’ve known intuitively have been there, but we couldn’t prove it. Now, the proof is being provided. And no one can argue the counter to that. So, stay tuned—there’s a lot more to come,” Johnson promised.
He said the courts “should take a step back and allow these processes to play out. DOGE is making sure that your tax dollars are spent in the way they were intended to be spent.”
‘Game-changer’ in Washington
Referencing the nation’s “unprecedented $36 trillion federal debt,” Johnson told reporters that Congress has reached a moment of reckoning. Democrats don’t seem to understand that the United States collapsing under its own debt is a real possibility unless waste, fraud and corruption are rooted out.
Believing that the government can endlessly spend and throw around billions, and borrow more and more money at an unprecedented rate without any repercussions, is living in a dangerous fantasy world, he said.
“You’re going to see [these issues] reflected in the reconciliation package that comes forward, you’re going to see it reflected in the appropriations package that comes forward, and you’re going to see it in these efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.”
The Speaker of the House ended the press conference with a loaded comment that must have rattled Democrat nerves. “We think the final number on that is going to be substantial and a game changer in Washington.”
“A clear threat came across in Johnson’s final sentence,” wrote conservative columnist and attorney Jeff Wilders. “Now that Congress knows where the waste is —in USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Department of Education, DEI spending, the Treasury, Social Security, and the rest— legislators are working up a budget bill to drain the Deep State.”
The media is downplaying it, but “the fact that Johnson announced a budget bill is critical,” the attorney pointed out. “Bills related to reconciling the budget can be passed using a process called ‘budget reconciliation,’ which avoids the Senate filibuster and can be approved with a simple majority.”
Unlike executive actions, a budget bill passed through reconciliation is almost untouchable by judicial review, legal experts say.
If it turns out that Republicans are solidly behind DOGE as seems to be the case, and Congress itself does the cost-cutting, it will instantly resolve the “constitutional crisis” and the charge that Trump is “overriding Congress” by stopping authorized payments.
Legislative and Executive Branches Working Together
Democrat opponents thought they had Trump stymied with lawsuits and were preparing for high stakes showdowns in the courtroom. By shifting the conflict to a budget reconciliation bill, Trump is likely to outmaneuver left-leaning courts seeking to thwart his policies.
The way things seem to be playing out, Trump is no longer fighting the bureaucratic status quo alone. Congress is behind him; the Legislative and Executive branches are working together to expose and defund the deep state.
What recourse do liberal and progressive judges have if, for example, both Congress and the President cancel USAID?
The same judges siding against Trump using “Congressional-prerogatives” as their argument, must now make the tortured argument that neither Congress nor the Executive should be trusted with the purse strings.
This outlandish approach has actually been tried. In the latest lawsuit by 14 attorneys general, the group’s brief argued that the court needed to step in “because Congress has abdicated its responsibility as an equal branch of government,” the AP reported.
The likely outcome of that farfetched argument is not difficult to gauge, legal observers say.
‘Trust Through Transparency’
The second press conference that poured fuel into the administration’s political momentum in dismantling the deep state appears to have been coordinated with Speaker Johnson’s announcement.
With James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, standing quietly in the background, Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL) announced she will lead the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.
Luna explained her task force’s goal will be to form “a new relationship between the government and the governed” and restore “trust through transparency.” She announced a list of previously top-secret files to be declassified, disclosed, and released to America; the first three include the 1963 Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy that same year.
The task force will also declassify and release the 9/11 files, the Covid-19 Origin files and the UFO files.
Rep. Luna said her task force will be different from previous Congressional committee that promised full disclosure but ended up going nowhere. This time, she said, it would be a multi-agency task force, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the White House.
For decades, “national security” was the ubiquitous excuse for shutting down anything that was politically threatening. But with a multi-agency commitment to declassification, that excuse might finally be set aside.
In a sneak peek, Luna dropped a bombshell about the JFK assassination, saying that evidence pointed to “two shooters.” The official story for over sixty years has stuck tenaciously to the State Department’s assertion that a single shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted independently. All opinions to the contrary, including those suggesting a CIA connection, have been scorned as “conspiracy theories.”
Luna’s Task Force aims to launch a systematic unraveling of decades of classified secrets that promise to shake the foundations of the bureaucratic state. In this historic move toward transparency, Trump has moved the fight not only to Congress but to public disclosure, which could pose the most dangerous threat the deep state has yet faced.
Trump Tightens Ship
The third and biggest press conference last week was billed as Elon Musk’s delivery of a DOGE status report to the President and took place in the Oval Office.
Prior to Musk’s presentation, President Trump signed a new executive order requiring all federal agencies to cooperate with DOGE and its cost-cutting operations. It ordered agencies to “coordinate and consult with DOGE to shrink the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions.”
Federal agencies were told to plan for “large-scale reductions in workforce,” by reporting on what functions could be eliminated or combined. The new executive order forbids agencies from hiring more than one new worker for every four who leave government service.
Perhaps most importantly, the executive order makes it a terminable offense for a bureaucrat to leak information meant to be confidential or classified, or to misuse or waste government resources. Resisting DOGE’s work, sabotaging or otherwise impeding it, will now be breaking a direct executive order.
FEMA Disgraced
In his status report to the president, Musk offered many examples of fraud, waste and abuse. He noted that FEMA had forked over $59 million to New York hotels to house illegal migrants just last week, paying amounts that were double normal room rates—even at a 100% occupancy rate.
“Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” Musk said.
Of the $59.3 million, $19 million was for direct hotel costs, while the balance funded other services such as food and security, Fox News reported.
One day after the spending was uncovered by DOGE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed that “Secretary Kristi Noem has clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to NYC migrant hotels,” the article said, quoting a DHS spokesman.
Shortly afterward, Trump suggested in an online post that FEMA should be abolished.
“FEMA spent tens of millions of dollars in Democrat areas, disobeying orders, but left the people of North Carolina high and dry, freezing in tents,” the president declared in an online post. “FEMA should be terminated. It has been totally ineffective. Individual states should handle storms, themselves, as they come. Big savings, far more efficient.”
Bottlenecked in a Mine Shaft
In another shocking disclosure of government inefficiency and waste, Musk revealed in his status report to President Trump that DOGE is investigating a limestone mine in Pennsylvania called “Iron Mountain,” where federal employee retirements are processed manually.
As reported by Fox News, Musk explained that only 10,000 government employees can resign in any given month, because the records are stored in a literal mine shaft in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes and access is limited by a mine shaft elevator.
Incredibly, for our technologically advanced, digitalized society, record-processing in the mine remains strictly manual, contingent on the speed of the elevator.
The retirement process for each individual can take multiple months,” Musk noted, describing the Iron Mountain mine as a “time warp” that causes operations to take infinitely longer than they should.
“The elevator sometimes breaks down and then nobody can retire. Doesn’t that sound crazy?” Musk asked reporters in the Oval Office.
The federal government recently spent $160 million to “modernize” Iron Mountain and failed, he attested. Someone at the top apparently just gave up after that.
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Biggest Fraud of All
Perhaps most staggering of all Musk’s examples of wasteful spending was the revelation that Social Security checks are still being issued to people over 150 years old.
Musk unearthed a “jaw-dropping irregularity from the U.S. Social Security database,” the Gateway Pundit reported. “The numbers are truly mind-boggling: over 25 million Americans registered aged 100 and older, with some purportedly older than the U.S. Constitution itself.”
Social media commenters suggested the impossible age scenarios are the result of illegal aliens using the numbers of deceased Americans.
“This might be the biggest fraud in history,” Musk noted.
Lest anyone think these grotesque irregularities are a recent phenomenon, a full decade ago in 2015, the SSA’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide.
Even more astounding, in 2023, an expanded audit looked at Social Security recipients aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier showed up, lacking a date of death, meaning they are still active.
The facts, according to a 2024 PEW Research report, are that only 80,000 Americans aged 100 or more were living then. That leaves a shocking discrepancy of 18.1 million who were deceased but supposedly still receiving social security and possibly disability as well.
Where were those payments going, and why was this outrageous degree of government incompetence if not outright fraud allowed to continue all these years?
With DOGE empowered to unravel the mystery, Americans may soon find out.
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Blockbuster Find: DOGE Nails $4.7 Trillion in Unaccounted US Treasury Payments
In another stunning DOGE discovery reported by Fox News early this week, the waste-slashing agency discovered an identification code linking U.S. Treasury payments to a budget line item which accounts for nearly $4.7 trillion in payments that were often left blank. Meaning the recipients were unidentified, making tracing impossible.
The discovery was announced on the same day DOGE updated the “DOGE.gov Savings” page, which said the total estimated savings since the establishment of the budget-slashing department comes to about $55 billion, the article reported.
It noted the savings listed by DOGE are a combination of “fraud detection, contract and lease cancellations, contract and lease renegotiations, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, program changes, and regulatory savings.”
“We are working to upload all of this data in a digestible and fully transparent manner” DOGE wrote on the site, adding that the data will be updated twice per week until eventually becoming real-time.
