WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s shoot-from-the-lip style kept Americans on the edge of their seats during last year’s campaign. But now that he’s speaking as a president and not as a candidate, his words are being used against him in court in the blizzard of litigation challenging his agenda.
The spontaneity is complicating his administration’s legal positions. Nowhere has this been clearer than in cases involving his adviser Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the driving force in his efforts to downsize and overhaul the federal government.
The latest example came earlier this week when U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that Musk had likely violated the Constitution by dismantling the United States Agency for International Development.
The lawsuit turned on the question of whether the billionaire entrepreneur had overstepped his authority. Justice Department lawyers and White House officials insist that Musk is merely a presidential adviser, not the actual leader of DOGE.
Trump most notably boasted of creating DOGE during his prime-time address to a joint session of Congress and said it was “headed by Elon Musk.” Republicans gave Musk a standing ovation, and he saluted from the gallery above the House chamber.
“Trump’s words were essential, central and indispensable,” said Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers for USAID employees who filed the lawsuit. “His admissions took what would have been a tough case and made it into a straightforward one.”
The looseness with words is a shift from predecessors like Democratic President Barack Obama, who used to say that he was careful because anything he said could send troops marching or markets tumbling.
Trump has no such feeling of restraint, and neither do other members of his Republican administration such as Musk.
Chuang, who is based in Maryland and was nominated by Obama, also cited social media posts from Musk, who writes frequently on X, the platform that he owns.
For example, Musk posted “we spent the weekend feeding USAID to the woodchipper” on Feb. 3. The agency was being brought to a standstill at that time, with staff furloughed, spending halted and headquarters shut down.
“Musk’s public statements and posts … suggest that he has the ability to cause DOGE to act,” Chuang wrote in his ruling.
Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, said Trump was fulfilling his campaign promise “to make the federal government more efficient and accountable to taxpayers.”
“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” he said.
Anthony Coley, who led public affairs at the Justice Department during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, said statements involving civil litigation were always coordinated between his office and the West Wing.
The words could be used to support what we’re doing or undermine what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s a carefully choreographed effort to make sure there was no daylight between what was said in the court of public opinion and what could ultimately play out in the court of law.”
In comparison to how things were done in the past, Coley said, Trump has a “ready-fire-aim approach of doing business.”
Trump doesn’t usually let legal disputes force him to turn down the volume. During a criminal investigation over his decision to keep classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving the White House in 2021, Trump spoke extensively about the case in an interview with Fox News.
Longtime defense lawyers were startled because defendants are usually encouraged to keep mum while facing an indictment. But the situation panned out for Trump. His legal team delayed the case, and the special counsel’s office dropped the charges after Trump won the election last November — presidents can’t be prosecuted while in office.
DOGE has been the focus of nearly two dozen lawsuits. It’s often prevailed so far in cases involving access to government data, where several plaintiffs have struggled to convince judges to block the organization’s actions.
But it’s also run into challenges, such as a lawsuit over whether DOGE must comply with public records requests. The Trump administration asserted in court that DOGE is part of the White House, meaning it’s exempt.
Judge Christopher Cooper, also nominated by Obama, disagreed, siding with a government watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
“Musk and the President’s public statements indicate that USDS” — the original acronym for the organization that was renamed as DOGE — “is in fact exercising substantial independent authority,” wrote Cooper, who is based in Washington.
Cooper concluded that DOGE can “identify and terminate federal employees, federal programs, and federal contracts. Doing any of those three things would appear to require substantial independent authority; to do all three surely does.”
He ordered DOGE to start responding to requests about the team’s role in mass firings and disruptions to federal programs. The administration unsuccessfully asked the judge to reconsider, saying the judge “fundamentally misapprehended” the agency’s structure.
The cases are still in their early stages, and the novel legal questions they’re raising will take time for the courts to consider, said Michael Fragoso, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“What Elon does on Twitter is not necessarily what DOGE does,” he said. “My hope would be courts take the time to sift between those two.”
Just because Musk claims credit online for deep agency cuts, that doesn’t necessarily translate to DOGE having authority in the eyes of the law, Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell argued in a recent debate on the issue.
DOGE is recommending changes, he said, but it’s the agency heads who are actually putting them into effect.
“And that’s all that the courts are going to care about as to what the Supreme Court is going to do,” McConnell said at the debate hosted by the National Constitution Center.
