A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There
wired.com230 points by ck2 17 hours ago
230 points by ck2 17 hours ago
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the merits of USAID is beside the point. A single unelected and unqualified person must not be given the authority to dismantle a massive US government program.
Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.
You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
> But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules.
It's not even established that he has the power. The fact that they do something doesn't mean they have that power.
And given that, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore all other rules.
> You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no?
> It's not even established that he has the power.
Sure, I agree with that. But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers. The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
> When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no
Not when those people work for the government. This is one of the few things I agree with FDR on: the nature of democracy means that government employees must have less employment protections than private sector workers, not more. Even if you have an expansive view of what the constitution allows in terms of Congress providing for independent executive branch agencies, at most that means the President can’t ignore Congress’s intent in funding certain programs. But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches. That effectively gives a small class of people more say over the operation of the government than the electorate as a whole.
> The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.
I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.
That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.
That’s just how litigation works. If the issue comes down to the payment of money, courts assume that it can be sorted out eventually by ordering money to be paid or returned. The government can destroy your business with an illegal regulation, and they don’t have to ask courts for permission first. I’m such cases, you probably won’t even get money back from the government. It would be bizarre to impose a higher standard of oversight for the government to restructure its own operations than for the government to regulate private conduct.
The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.
That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.
Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.
> Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".
It's like byzantine faults, no system can protect you if you don't have some minimum of correctly functioning legislators, judges, and executives.
> But that still doesn’t allow the bureaucracy invoking HR rules to protect itself against the actions of the elected branches.
It's not hr writing the rules here. It's them enforcing what they were given.
Also, they're not saying he cannot do what they want to do. It's that the law prescribes that certain things need to happen first.
Those rules were given to them by elected people in Congress.
Edit:
To add
> But the President doesn’t need a court ruling giving permission before he exercises his powers.
The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously. This administration doesn't care about whether something is lawful. When you act fast enough the damage will be done before your called out on it.
South Korea saw a president declare martial law and the other branches held him accountable very quickly. I am not convinced the US in the current state would.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
Not at all. The founders were focused on having a vigorous executive who could “just do things.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The system they created is not based on the premise of cautious bureaucracy. It was based on having frequent elections that would empower a vigorous president and political appointees to carry out what they had campaigned on.
The founders were men of action. They would be horrified by how our government today is run by lawyers through APA litigation. The HR-ification of the American government is a mid-20th century invention.
> They would be horrified by how our government today
100%, just not in the direction you think. They would be apalled at Trump's blatant, in your face corruption all while the MAGA base cheers him on.
> The system was created with the assumption that the president would act cautiously and judiciously
I do not believe this is true historically
Are you calling congress "HR"? Congress created USAID, and did not approve it being destroyed.
No, I’m talking about the article, which is focused on literal HR rules. USAID still exists on paper but Congress reallocated its budget to the State Department.
So, per your interpretation, the president can just ignore any law created by Congress by simply allocating zero funds to any agency carrying out the law?
USAID was created by Congress when it formally codified USAID into statute through the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998.
So, how is the president allowed to simply ignore a law passed by Congress?
So there's not like statutory rules governing the mechanism by which the President makes that guy his avatar (not Rubio, the guy in the article)?
If he ordered a dog to dismantle USAID, would the ineffectiveness of that simply be due to the dog being incompetent and not be legally challengeable?
The Administrator of USAID is a presidentially appointed and senate confirmed position. Under the Vacancies Reform Act the President can appoint another Senate confirmed official from anywhere else in the government to fill that spot for up to 210 days. Trump appointed Rubio to that role.
An acting administrator or agency head can then generally “detail” an employee from anywhere else in the government to serve as a deputy in a temporary basis, which Rubio did here. Agency heads generally have broad discretion to hire their deputies.
> on March 20, two days after Rubio placed Lewin atop the USAID hierarchy
> By March 26, the emails show, Lewin still hadn’t accepted the job offer, and had not filed his OF-306, the federal government's standard pre-employment background screening form; without this document, a federal agency cannot lawfully issue a final job offer or consummate an appointment
> A detailing agreement between the GSA and USAID dated February 14—two weeks after Lewin says he began at USAID—specifes that “commencement of the detail is contingent upon the Detailee’s successful adjudication and receipt of any necessary security clearances and other pre-employment screening required by USAID.
More serious issues than "HR" should have barred him from working, for at least some of the time he did.
Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes. If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
That's how it should be. But they counted on the courts being slower to catch up with stuff than that they could destroy it and by and large that proved to be correct. The checks and balances in the USA are not prepared to deal with people at this level of power that are as malicious as this. The founders more or less left that as an exercise for the future to figure out and may have presaged such a thing happening in some of their writings.
> Even if it was legal for Trump or Rubio to shut it down, they still have to do it through authorized agents and legal processes.
Yes, but the paperwork that decides who is the President or his appointee’s lawful agent is different than the civil service paperwork for employment. Lewin was appointed as an SGE. This article is about the HR details of his internal transfer into USAID. But there is no rule that says someone must be an employee of an agency to assist in shutting down the agency under delegated authority from the cabinet official that oversees the agency.
> If a "police officer" conducted a search without paperwork on file that establishes their authority to search, it would be illegal, right?
Yes. But if he was transferred within the department from vice into homicide and hadn’t done all his paperwork yet, would that be illegal? And also, doing a search is a potential impingement on individual rights. Very different from a doing an internal reorganization within a department. If a CEO pulls in someone from one department to clean house in another department, how much HR paperwork do you really need?
Only Congress had the power. But Congress didn’t call the Executive branch on it, so … here we are.
That’s not quite accurate. While Congress didn’t abolish USAID, it did enact appropriations bills that transferred the funding to the State Department. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779
USAID still exists on paper. But under the current appropriations bills, the funding is allocated to the State Department.
That bill was never passed into law.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...
It was incorporated into the consolidated 2026 appropriations bill that was enacted: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr4779
Most DOGE activity was in 2025, no?
There was a recession bill passed in 2025 July 2025 for already appropriated monies.
Moreover, the impoundment rules don’t require congress to act first before the president acts. They require the money to be spent, but if the budgetary authority is provided over a year it’s hard to say when the president must spend that money within the year. (Unless there’s specific requirements in the statute.)
That was only passed a year _after_ DOGE had already gutted USAID entirely, so the Executive branch was acting outside the authority of Congress (or in contravention with Congress) when it gutted USAID in early 2025.
There was an bill rescinding already appropriated 2025 USAID funding in July 2025: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
There was a few months of overhang, but the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to pay out billions of dollars that were already allocated to contracts during that period.
"A few months of overhang" was thousands of people starving or dying of malaria. Also, they didn't rescind all the funding, $4B was just left to expire.
But again DOGE acted before that was in place. All I’m saying is I expect a future DOJ to find legal grounds for going ofter those involved for exceeding their authority.
I think appointing people who absolutely should not be doing the jobs they are appointed to is a way of sidestepping all law. They want to destroy all government and what better way to do it than through sheer incompetence with a layer of plausible deniability.
There are other theories of course.
I guess your point of view makes sense if you think of “government” as some self-sustaining organism where voting is supposed to nudge the ship but can’t steer it. Fortunately, that isn’t the government the founders created.
elections have consequences. We have a representative democracy and administrative employees serve at the pleasure of the head of the administration. "shoulds" and "musts" only go as far as the political will to enforce them. The overwhelming majority of the electorate seems to care about how expensive their personal lifestyle is with various takes on individual liberty vs enforced morality used as wedge issues (neither party is consistently on one side or the other of this balance, fwiw.)
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.
It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
That is not true. Funds are not allocated "for the State department". There is a statutory purpose for every allocated dollar.
As I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
No, the executive can’t do whatever it wants. But if the executive can do it, then the President must be able to do it. In principle you can have a unitary executive that’s also very weak.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
This article isn't about that, though? USAID was never designated as an independent agency. But it was a statutory agency, which means that the President was required to run it according to its statutory structure.
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
I was responding to the following comment:
> I understand it, under the "unitary executive theory" the executive can legally do whatever it wants.
You’re right that this doesn’t have to do with the unitary executive. That’s my point. It’s about things like the impoundment control act.
And to be clear, they couldn't have passed that law because doing so would be extremely unpopular. I.e. they would not have been able to gain the required support for their actions.
When it comes to government spending programs, according to our constitution the elections that have consequences are those for seats in Congress. The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
> The executive doesn’t have the authority to cancel USAIDs funding, nor the funding of specific programs within it
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
No, those are the talking points you are fed. The appropriation act assigns specific dollar amounts to specific program types and countries or regions. US AID would allocate to specific providers/NGO programs but its not like there were any substitutions made. They just stopped the flow of dollars with no warning. More than 81% of programs were simply stopped and the funds expired without being spent.
For 2025 there was a continuing resolution to keep funding at 2024 levels.
The 2024 bill[1] section 7019 references the state division document[2], which has the spending by category, the tables start on page 20.
[1] - http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF
[2] - https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/Division%20F%2...
But in mid-2025 there was a bill that rescinded already appropriated funds: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4
And for 2026 the appropriations bills allocated the money directly to the state department.
Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws. But they didn't rescind everything. $4B expired because it was unspent. That is a crime, and it has name, and that name is impoundment.
Also, are you going to even acknowledge that your previous deflections were completely incorrect, and that you just reflexively moved to a new deflection that is also incorrect?
> Yes, after the laws were broken congress said daddy Trump can break laws
The impoundment control act specifically provides for Congress to resend previously appropriate spending if the president doesn’t want to spend it. nothing in the empowerment control act that clearly prevents the president from freezing spending for a short period within a single given budget year before asking Congress to resend particular appropriations.
You just can't do it, can you? Take the L man, you just got schooled and you refuse to admit it.