"The Montana court separately declared that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. In legal terms, a suspect class is a group that has historically faced such severe discrimination that any law targeting them must meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive—the same standard applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race. [...] The practical effect is sweeping: any Montana law that singles out transgender people will now face strict scrutiny, meaning the state must prove the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve it—a standard that laws almost never survive.
"Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. [...] What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions."
Shoutout to Project Hail Mary for being the only media where the unconscious protagonist is dragged off screen by an alien spider monster and the audience's reaction is heartbreak on behalf of the alien spider monster.
"Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup If this were happening in any other country, we’d be calling it a coup."
This article's about a subject too important to be caught behind a paywall. Please read this and take it seriously. Take care of each other, y'all.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern
Feb 04, 202512:49 PM
[Image: Elon Musk and Donald Trump standing together, behind shattered glass.]
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, and Yauhen Akulich/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it.
With Donald Trump’s blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk’s team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress’ explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing out principled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage.
What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up. Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected, is now attempting to restructure the government around his own whims, vendettas, and obsessions. He is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines. Musk seems to reject basic aspects of the nation’s constitutional democracy, replacing the separation of powers with the rule of an autocrat. Many of his offensives appear to reject the legitimacy of any legal limitations that stand in his way, treating federal statutes and precedents as mere suggestions he can take or leave at will.
An elected leader who illegally entrenches his own power, as Trump did four years ago, is engaged in a self-coup. This can be done by unlawfully expanding executive power, or dismantling coordinate branches of government, both of which we are witnessing. What do we call it when the president is too lazy to gut the government himself, giving away power to a zealous and unaccountable friend? Call it a double-self-coup, an autogolpe, a power grab—the label matters less than the reality unfolding before our eyes: a systematic dismantling of democratic institutions in favor of unchecked executive power and personal rule, with no regard for constitutional constraints or accountability.
Musk’s actions since Jan. 20 are so extreme that any summary runs the risk of sounding alarmist. This is not overstatement or embellishment: Although the billionaire purports to exercise executive authority, he does not appear to hold any formal office, serving in the ill-defined role of “special government employee.” His task force, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is just a group of allies who’ve embedded themselves within the government to wreak maximum havoc on its operations. Musk has stacked the Office of Personnel Management—the government’s traditionally apolitical HR department—with loyalists who’ve obtained troves of information about federal employees. (Several of his “advisers” are reportedly fresh out of high school.) DOGE is pressuring federal employees to resign with an unfunded “buyout” that Congress would need to approve (and hasn’t). A new lawsuit alleges that Musk’s deputies have illegally compromised millions of workers’ private data; they are also illegally operating a commercial server to control databases that contain workers’ addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical history, according to two whistleblowers.
DOGE is not a government agency. It has not been constituted as such and it operates free from the ethics rules and oversight that other government entities require. Musk does not have the highest level security clearance. What is it called when a single man, for whom no one voted, gains access to closely guarded, private information that he could then potentially use to threaten and coerce civil servants into doing his bidding?
Musk’s operatives next infiltrated the Department of the Treasury so his team could take over the government’s finances. They demanded access to the Treasury payment systems that disburse $6 trillion every year, including Medicare benefits, Social Security, federal salaries, and payments to government contractors. These systems hold extraordinarily sensitive data on millions of taxpayers. David Lebryk, a career civil servant and universally respected veteran of the agency who oversaw the payments, denied DOGE control over the system, insisting that they had no right to access it. The Trump administration promptly put him on leave, and Trump’s newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent turned the system over to DOGE.
Musk’s team now has the ability to halt a vast range of payments to individual Americans, federal agencies, government contractors, and countless others. He has declared that he will use this authority to simply stop payments for government-funded groups and services that he dislikes. At his direction, DOGE is preparing to halt funds appropriated by Congress that allegedly clash with Trump’s agenda. That effort would violate the law, as a federal judge confirmed on Friday; the Constitution assigns the spending power to Congress, and directs the president to “faithfully execute” its commands.
Flouting this bedrock principle, Musk is now defunding organizations that rely on government contracts, often based on his own paranoia and disinformation. For instance, he has railed against Lutheran aid groups, accusing them of receiving “illegal payments” and promising to shut them down. But these groups’ government grants are perfectly legal, and go toward resettling refugees and facilitating domestic adoptions, among other good work. What’s illegal is Musk halting grants that have already been awarded through a process set forth by Congress.
What is it called when a single man, for whom no one voted, awards himself control over trillions of dollars to weaponize the federal treasury against his perceived enemies?
Musk’s broader goal is to halt humanitarian aid across the board, spinning falsehoods to mask his crusade against the vulnerable. Over the weekend, he claimed the authority to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, a major agency that distributes tens of billions of dollars in assistance around the world. Its work covers HIV/AIDS treatment, maternal health, famine relief, education, and democracy defense. Musk appears to loathe the agency in part because it funds pro-democracy work in countries where he has allied with anti-democratic parties. (He also falsely accused it of funding the creation of COVID as a “bioweapon.”)
Together, Trump and Musk have reportedly purged dozens of senior officials from USAID and locked out more than 1,000 contractors. On Sunday, Musk falsely claimed that the agency is “a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” asserting that Trump gave him permission to abolish it. Its website has gone dark, and Musk’s deputies emailed employees to stay home on Monday in advance of its imminent closure. His team recently raided the agency’s headquarters, demanding access to secure systems containing classified information that they were not authorized to see. When top security officials denied them access, as the law required, the Trump administration put the officials on leave, then gave DOGE free rein.
Related From Slate
Denise Cana I’m a Federal Worker. Elon Musk’s Government Data Heist Is the Entire Ballgame. Read More
Even the president, of course, has no authority to abolish USAID. A temporary government employee, purportedly acting under the president’s orders, certainly doesn’t either, no matter his personal wealth. Congress established the agency by statute and barred the president from shuttering it without approval; it would take another act of Congress to dissolve USAID or subsume it into the State Department, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed had happened on Monday. (One would think the former senator would know better.) Trump and Musk are hoping Republicans who control both chambers won’t bother to stop them. So far, they are correct. Congressional Republicans—and many Democrats—have raised few objections to this unlawful usurpation of power. Congress should attempt to wrest back control from Musk, to mount a defense against his incursion into its constitutional prerogatives through legislation, subpoenas, and hearings. But instead, the legislative branch remains passive, controlled by feckless Republicans who prioritize loyalty to Trump over the principled discharge of their legal duties.
What is it called when a single man, for whom no one voted, asserts the right to wipe out entire government departments, fire their staff, and shut down their global operations by personal decree?
While we debate the meaning of “constitutional crisis” versus “coup,” the thing is happening right before our eyes. We are accustomed to the notion that a coup, or “self-coup,” happens when tanks are on the streets. But as experts on authoritarianism in this century have shown, a coup is more likely to be put into effect by “government lawyers” wielding briefcases and official-looking orders than by armed men on the streets (though that is already happening in immigration enforcement). What we have learned from a string of authoritarian takeovers in Hungary, Russia, Poland, and elsewhere, is that when the legislature and courts are sidelined, as is happening right now in D.C., this is not “cost savings” or “efficiency.” It is a hostile takeover that looks almost exactly like a corporate takeover, except what has been cast off is constitutional democracy itself. The threat is not diminished because the men in office rose to power through a free election; the nature of a self-coup is that the regime, once installed, obliterates all restraints on its absolute rule.
An unelected emperor—who has now placed himself above the Congress and the courts—working with a cadre of coders with no knowledge of governance, has been installed by what seems to be a figurehead president to deconstruct the component pieces of government that he disfavors. As Garrett Graff ably illustrated over the weekend, if this were happening in any country other than the United States of America, it would be acknowledged as a coup. Just because the president is authorizing it doesn’t make it lawful. And just because Congress has done nothing to stop him doesn’t make it legal. The fact that it doesn’t quite look like a coup, because there are suits and ties and papers involved, is by design. This is the dismantling not just of entire federal agencies, but of an entire architecture of democratic self-governance, by a man who believes we will not be able to name it quickly enough to stop it.
To my fellow US peeps, if you have federal student loans, you might want to download a copy of your current student loan information to have as a backup for the future. Unelected DOGE participants (they aren't official, I will not call them officials) have access to the Department of Education's federal student loan database. For your own sake, have a physical copy and personal digital copy for your records.
Sources:
Slate: "I'm a Federal Worker. Elon Musk's Government Data Heist Is the Entire Ballgame."
Wired: "A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System."
Washington Post: "Trump preps order to dismantle Education Dept. as DOGE probes data."
The relevant update from Alt National Park Service, an anonymous federal employee who's been active since the last Trump administration.
I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But harm reduction is the name of the game, so I'm attempting to do that. Just, be careful and take care of yourselves and your data- data privacy really fucking matters, and we'll be learning that lesson more and more in the foreseeable future.
thinking about when i got heat exhaustion at the House on the Rock and the experience was so overwhelming that i had a panic attack and thought i was hearing ghosts and genuinely fully believed i was going to die
which sounds like an overreaction, unless you've ever been to house on the rock and then you probably understand exactly what i'm saying.
imagine it's 90 some degrees and you havent had any water all day and you've just walked through not one, or two, but three fake towns,
past a 200 foot tall whale,
through multiple rooms of animatronics and mannequins,
and you havent seen sunlight for almost five hours and you're getting dizzy and then you walk through the mouth of a fake devil and end up staring at this
and this just goes on and on and on in a maze and every single one of these organs is playing music and some of them have animatronics on them playing and you can't find the exit and sweat is literally pouring off of you and finally you turn down another hallway and instead of an exit it looks like this
and at this point your vision is blurring and you feel like your heart is beating out of your chest but every turn just brings you to more h r geiger ass hallways of organs and theyre all still blaring
THAT'S what happened?! All those comedy websites years ago all shifted to doing videos and lost all their money at once because just Facebook tricked them with inflated video views?!
- so between 2014-2016 facebook launches a massive ‘pivot to video’ campaign to draw media orgs to their video-based features. zuckerberg’s doing rounds, saying that in the near future, newsfeeds will mostly be video, and that video is the future of media. to back this up, they release tons of wild viewership metrics for ads on facebook, enticing advertisers to prioritize video, and as a result, the media that relies upon advertisers for funding began to do the same.
- this had an industry-wide impact, and media orgs, from established news, to humor websites, to smaller creators, fire writers and those primarily focused on print, and direct resources to their video creation efforts.
- around 2016, it’s revealed that facebook completely fabricated their original numbers, likely inflating them between 150-900%. additionally, their viewership metric considered 3 seconds of a person watching to be a ‘view’ (whereas youtube had a 30 second requirement for the same metric).
-Having totally restructured in order to pivot to facebook video, many media orgs were unable to recapture hard won (and and sometimes decades old) audiences. College Humor, Funny or Die, MTV News, Vice, Mic, and Vox were among those that were seriously impacted.
- after a 2018 class action lawsuit, facebook (who maintain that the whole ordeal was caused by a simple error in calculation) was made to pay 40 million in damages, which 1, is a paltry sum when we consider the 22 billion they made in profit that same year, and 2, does nothing to bring back the jobs, audiences, and media orgs they destroyed. to make matters worse, many still posit that it was never the public, but rather advertisers that preferred video over text, meaning that facebook intentionally deceived everyone involved specifically to secure more advertising dollars. so yeah, fb is evil and… probably should be stopped
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