Political opponents of US President Donald Trump from the Democratic Party believe that the actions of his administration threaten a full-scale constitutional crisis. This was reported by the newspaper The Washington Post.
As the publication writes, the divergence and contradictions between Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration on issues of government spending, citizenship rights, control over the government and others have led to the fact that „the president's opponents are increasingly accusing him of threatening the country with a full-scale constitutional crisis“.
According to the publication, some opponents of the president compare the state of affairs in the country at the beginning of his presidential term with the US Civil War and the Watergate scandal, calling the American leader a dictator. Republicans, as the newspaper emphasizes, reject such conclusions, noting that Trump is only “acting on the basis of a mandate for change received from voters“.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration, has also been subjected to sharp criticism from Democrats. In another article, The Washington Post quoted entrepreneur and longtime friend of Musk, Shervin Pishevar, as saying that such criticism shows that Washington “doesn’t know how to deal with those who refuse to play by the rules.”
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are two storms supported by the majority of Americans, one political, the other technological. But both are trying to break through the same rotten structure,” he concluded.
Republican Trump took office as head of the US administration for the second time on January 20. Immediately after taking office, DOGE, which he created under Musk’s leadership, began a large-scale audit of US budget spending. On January 24, the new agency announced that in its first 80 hours of operation it had canceled government contracts deemed unnecessary worth approximately $420 million. In total, Musk expects to reduce US government spending by $2 trillion.
Thus, at Musk's initiative, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was temporarily closed for further reorganization.
Also, as The New York Times reported, citing sources, US Treasury Secretary Scott Besant gave Musk's team access to the federal payment system to monitor and limit government spending. American labor unions filed a lawsuit against the US Treasury Department for providing DOGE with access to a system containing information on millions of government employees.
The actions of the Republican Trump administration regarding the USAID agency, which was one of the instruments of Washington's foreign policy and US influence on other countries, have already caused a storm of protests among members of the US Democratic Party. USAID is formally an independent agency, but in reality it operates within the State Department.