By John Pottinger and Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, February 23, 2025
The Truth Abut Trump’s Dismantling the Government Bureaucracy and the “Constitutional Crisis” A Marxist Assessment
That President Trump has dismantled or significantly gutted some dozen or more government agencies, frozen the allocation of trillions of dollars in the federal budget allocated to run the country, fired multiple thousands of government workers – including top heads of major agencies and departments – appointed the nation’s richest capitalists and their cohorts to scrutinize how the new or reconstructed agencies will operate, if at all, and how millions, billions and trillions of dollars will be spent is all TRUE AND AT LEAST IN PART LEGAL under longstanding capitalist laws and regulations. And if Trump’s Supreme Court appointees approve some of his reactionary moves, they will become “the law of the land,” barring the intervention of mass working class forces in the streets that aim to challenge capitalist rule
Momentarily paralyzed Democrats, who, in the past, largely vetted the funding of these agencies via virtual gifts to the corporate elite, along with largely secret tax code dodges and overt multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the same capitalist elite, written into the federal and state budgets, are now scurrying to the courts armed with lawsuits, more than 70 to date, to restore the corporate giveaways that they allocated to their own capitalist overlords.
Meanwhile, while the torrent of lawsuits grind through the capitalist system, Trump, in the name of democracy, has ordered the public opening of the government’s financial records to reveal what has rarely been revealed, just how and to which capitalists the $trillions in working class tax dollars have been allocated.
Republican House Speaker Michael Johnson argued that the Trump administration’s actions were in line with common practice, noting, according to the New York Times, “that Congress often builds wiggle room into spending bills so that agencies can have flexibility in determining when and how to spend appropriated money.”
Trump’s reactionary justifications for gutting a myriad of allocations for social services varies from day to day, including his latest interpretations of the Constitution, alluding to recent Supreme Court decisions to wit, that the President can not be held responsible for his dirty deeds. These include his administration’s broad-ranging decrees abolishing Constitutionally protected birthright citizenship. His racist and sexist decrees have also been aimed at a host of basic democratic rights including women’s equality, LGBTQI rights, racial equality as well as sweeping decrees obliterating climate and environmental protections.
House Speaker Johnson, with his own daily changing justifications for Trump’s dismembering critical social policies, has argued that aides to Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire tech magnate who Trump deputized to make cuts to federal spending, were better positioned to make decisions on government funding than elected members of Congress.
Musk heads the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Johnson explained, has “commandeered direct access — including to sensitive payment systems at the Treasury.” Too hot to handle, days latter a federal judge restricted that access, warning of “irreparable harm.” But “irreparable harm” to whom? In part to the American public who rarely see how the government’s rip off tax system and free $billions and $trillions to the corporate elite work, but also to the capitalist elite who routinely hide or obfuscate their control of the $trillions of taxpayer dollars that fund countless corporate entities, with guaranteed profits to boot.
Obama Administration’s $Trillion Bailout
The Obama administration’s 2009 $trillion corporate bailout to save the nation’s richest dozen or so banks, which had massively overleveraged their real estate loans leading to unprecedented mortgage defaults, and Obama’s subsequent massive auto industry bailout are prime examples. Indeed, Chinese billionaires experienced a similar real estate catastrophe compelling their ruling class to engineer similar multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts.
But Obama’s multi-trillion dollar gift to corporate America’s top banks was more than doubled by Donald Trump’s first term Corona virus bailout, that similarly went to the richest few of capitalist America’s pharmaceutical giants. Trump’s publically uttered idiocies debunking the science proving that the virus was a deadly threat to all human life was openly ignored by both the scientific community and the corporate elite, if for no other reason than granting unprecedented $trillions to their largely monopolized pharmaceutical monopolies at outrageous drug prices bloated their profits as never before.
But Trumps initial moronic outbursts cost him the election, not to mention the one million US lives lost to his deadly delays, the largest number and percentage of the population in the world. Today’s Trump/Musk machinations are simply more of the same, but more blatant as the same ruling rich from US capitalism’s political duopoly, once again lie, cheat and steal as they plunder the nation’s wealth.
Education cuts
Musk’s proposed $900 million cuts in the Education Department budget are a prime example. Representing just 1 percent of Departments $97 billion annual budget, the close to $900 million “saved” will no doubt be reallocated to corporate entities more closely aligned with Republican financial interests, perhaps a further privatization of public schools.
Bi-partisan Clean Energy Cuts
A February 12 NYT headline read “Red States Have the Most to Lose as Trump Freezes Clean Energy Funds.” This was but another example of the Trump/Musk cabal shifting government $billions from one corporate sector to others more in line with their corporate interests.
Two days earlier, the NYT reported that, “In a quest to eliminate any funding linked to climate change, the Trump administration has frozen federal grants for everything from battery factories to electric school buses and issued executive orders that have halted federal approvals for wind and solar projects.”
The article continued, “Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are also working to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is projected to pour hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade into low-carbon energy technologies through tax credits, loans and grants.” We emphasize “tax credits, loans [Interest free?] and grants,” to underline the fact that in the hands of the corporate lawmakers, legislation aimed at “good causes” are funded by virtual gifts to the ruling class’s major corporations. In the absence of any nationalized industries under the control of the working class through their own institutions, all business in capitalist America is conducted via privately owned corporations overseen by the US capitalist government.
In the nearly three years since Biden’s bi-partisan Inflation Reduction Act was passed, The Times reported that “Private companies chasing the law’s tax breaks [Emphasis in italics added] have announced plans to spend $165.8 billion to build factories that make solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and more, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm. Roughly 80 percent of those investments are in Republican congressional districts, where they are creating a once-in-a-generation manufacturing boom.”
What The Times leaves out here are the critical facts regarding precisely which corporations – those owned by Democrats or Republicans – in these Republican electoral districts own and control the government’s $billions in grants and tax breaks. The implication is that the Democrats have been even-handed – with regard to allocating government funds to both parties. And now, the Republicans – the Democrats argue – should do the same.
But former President Joseph Biden had it right when he proclaimed in a campaign speech during his successful run against Trump, “The truth is that the rich don’t pay taxes.” Regardless, under Biden, they still didn’t.
In short, in the “good old days,” when congressional deal making and division of the spoils was a bit more the norm, stealing from the government’s budget allocations was the bi-partisan norm. But today, it appears, it is the “deal making” Trump’s turn to loot the Treasury.
The “Constitutional Crisis”
The Times noted, in defense of The Inflation Reduction Act, along with a separate 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, that the legislation “provided tens of billions of dollars in grants that have since been awarded by the federal government to private companies, states and nonprofit organizations. These are legally binding obligations that have allowed companies to make investments, sign leases and hire workers, with the expectation that they would be reimbursed by the government. [Emphasis in italics added,]
USAID: US Imperialism’s CIA Front
Among Trump’s most contested moves by the Democrats is his effort to abolish the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and place more than 2,000 of its “employees” on administrative leave while forcing the return of many from oversees work. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by Democratic Party aligned organizations, all claiming that USAID provides $millions and $billions in humanitarian aid to poor people around the world. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Since their formation USAID, the US National Endowment for Democracy and a host of other US-government related organizations have been the CIA’s central conduit to funnel $billions to reactionary governments and other rightest groups aimed at countering progressive and working class forces that challenge the US-based status quo.
In Latin American especially, USAID via the CIA, covertly or overtly engages in one after another CIA orchestrated coups, assassinations, secret war and more. USAID largely operates as a CIA front replete with “employees” with national security clearance – among the five million such “employees” working under the 18 US national security organizations.
In the US, the Cold War oriented anti-communist AFL-CIO has been among the major channels through which this “humanitarian aid” was funneled. Indeed, for decades the AFL-CIO itself was nicknamed the AFL-CIA, leading important unions like the United Auto Workers to formally disaffiliate in protest.
The AFL-CIO’s own American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), founded in 1961, has always received US funding, mostly through USAID. In the 1980s, it began receiving funds from the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which is funded through the USAID budget of the U.S. State Department. AIFLD was merged with three similar organizations into the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, yet another anti-Communist outfit aimed at funding rightest groups in Latin America, Africa and beyond.
A recent article in CounterPunch concluded: “Recent studies have demonstrated how the CIA was only the most notorious government entity that organized labor partnered with. In reality, the AFL-CIO became closely allied with almost the entire US foreign policy apparatus — not simply the CIA, but also the State Department, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.”
We need but mention here that the recent one-day mass mobilizations orchestrated by a few US government unions protesting the proposed dissolution of USAID, no doubt with USAID support, are not in the interest of the US working class or their allies among the oppressed and exploited.
That the Democrats have been in the forefront of characterizing USAID as a humanitarian enterprise is sheer fantasy, yet another imperialist lie to camouflage the truth about US dirty deeds. But there is some truth behind the fire and brimstone in Trump’s rhetoric.
The US in Latin America today is second to China regarding overall trade and investment. Trump’s threat to shift thousands of US troops from Europe/NATO to Latin America informs us that influencing Latin America’s economic and military policy via largely covert CIA methods, however deadly, is far less effective than having US troops on the ground. Trump has stated that an initial 2,000 US troops in Latin America might be a good place to start.
Are Trump’s Big Moves Legal?
Democrats and Republicans notwithstanding a February 22 NYT article entitled, “Is That Legal? A Guide to Trumps Big Moves So Far,” reviewed the “legality” of all Trump’s major measures to date and concluded that with few exceptions the vast majority were based on existing US law and/or decisions of past presidents or “flexible” US court interpretations of how US law should or might be interpreted. The “liberal” pro-Democratic Party NYT was in no hurry to deny Trump the same bourgeois/capitalist rights that prevail around the world. Today capitalist democracy includes the right to lie, cheat and steal along with maintaining US sanctions, embargos, assassinations, invasions and occupations as well as a myriad of anti-democratic polices and practices. Indeed, every important democratic right that exists in the US today was won in basic struggle in the streets and never to a change of heart and mind on the part of the US ruling class.
Trump is also flexible –withdrawing his obscene proposal to turn Gaza into a US-owned Riviera and other such atrocities, not to mention the ongoing US promoted genocide, including driving all Palestinians out of their homeland – permanently. The liberal Times also neglected to note that Trump declined to cut military spending. He also proceeded to seek the military base imprisonment of immigrants, his “legal option” when the powers that be are in no immediate need for cheap labor.
In summary, there are more than minor issues that are emerging to explain Trump’s seemingly irrational acts. A declining US bi-partisan imperialism, less and less able to compete on world markets – faced with ever declining profit rates, and an ever-declining share of the world’s wealth and trade – envisions implementing ever more intense measures to assure its domination. This can only mean that the more overtly reactionary Trump options, ultimately, imposing deeper attacks on working people than in the recent past. This includes imposing tariffs on foreign imports, that are bound to set off increased price inflation that punishes most all workers.
Any serious effort to reverse this course, can only be a working class fightback aimed at engaging the vast majority in democratically organized massive national mobilizations that unite society’s working people in all their manifestations. A pre-requisite to this fightback is the conscious construction of a revolutionary socialist party deeply integrated into all the vital struggles of the day. Join us! socialistaction.org socialistaction@lmi.net