The Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency team continue to crash into more federal agencies– shutting down ongoing work and firing thousands of federal employees.
It is a historic power grab by the president. But the chaotic approach also may be undermining his chances of getting the courts to go along with the effort as lawsuits pile up along with court orders blocking the DOGE team.
"I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do," Trump said this week in a lengthy Oval Office meeting with reporters. "We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this, this horrible stuff going on."
The examples of "fraud" Trump has so far offered up actually appear to be programs he just doesn't like, such as diversity initiatives.
There is serious concern from legal experts, conservatives and liberals alike about the administration's sweeping and abrupt moves– freezing broad swaths of federal money approved by Congress, gaining access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, and trying to shut down entire agencies overnight.
" From the chaos in and around the administration, to the chaos in the courts who are trying to grapple with it, and for all of us who are watching it happen," said Adam White with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, "we can all agree this is no way to run a country."
White said these actions don't appear to be carefully thought out and explained and that makes judges more likely to be confused and skeptical. Other experts on executive power agree.
"Every other presidential administration in modern American history spends a fair bit of time explaining in legal language and in legal arguments, why what they're doing is actually legal," said Deborah Pearlstein, a constitutional scholar at Princeton University who served in the Clinton White House.
"Even if it appears like a huge power grab and almost certainly beyond the scope of the president's power, they have some argument," she said.
But she said so far that is basically not happening in the second Trump Administration. And for that reason, it doesn't seem to be rolling out this DOGE restructuring effort in a way that would be in its own best interest – legally speaking.
Pearlstein said the conservative Supreme Court might be sympathetic to some of the ways the president appears to want to expand his powers.
But she says you learn quickly in the White House not to do anything without having some really good lawyers in the room to make sure you are going about it in the right way. She says Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who's heading the DOGE effort, appear to be figuring they can just do whatever they want and let the lawyers figure it out later.
"That seems to me pretty likely with some of the DOGE stuff to be what's going on," Pearlstein said. "And in part for that reason, a lot of that stuff is going to get struck down by the courts pretty quickly."
And that is already starting to happen.
On Thursday, two different federal judges temporarily blocked the Trump administration's attempt to shutter USAID. One ordered it to lift a funding freeze on foreign aid, while another barred the administration from placing thousands of USAID workers on leave.
Meanwhile a federal judge in Manhattan said Friday she will continue to block DOGE's access to sensitive Treasury Department records and systems. Also on Friday, a judge in D.C. issued an order temporarily blocking layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another agency Musk has said he wants to dismantle.
The Trump administration did get a win in the courts this week when a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed its "Fork in the Road" resignation offer to proceed, ruling labor unions that brought a lawsuit lacked standing.
For his part White with AEI said while he's not a fan of the administration's chaotic moves, "the only question is whether this is just an exceptional flurry of new policymaking energy in the first weeks of the administration?"
He said he hopes and expects that will be the case and that after a few weeks things will clarify and slow down.
But he also wondered, "if this is going to be the style of governance for four entire years… we'll see."
Certainly this is not the first administration that announced big plans to eliminate waste fraud and abuse in government.
"Under President Reagan there was something called the Grace Commission," said Linda Bilmes, a government efficiency expert with the Harvard Kennedy School.
"He charged the commission to work like bloodhounds– don't leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency," she said.
But she says both Reagan and President Clinton worked within the system. Clinton and his Vice President Al Gore received input from civil servants to find cost savings. Reagan worked with Congress to pass lasting legislation.
Bilmes said so far what she's seeing now is more of a clumsy attack on the system.
"Not only is this effort not accomplishing the task of weeding out inefficiency, but… It's like cutting off your arm to lose weight," she said
In other words it might seem like it works for a minute, but it creates a lot more problems than it solves.
Some political analysts note that the DOGE attack on Washington optics may be playing well to Trump's base and could be seen as a short-term political win.
But even so, why the administration is taking this approach, when Republicans control both the Senate and the House, have a starkly conservative Supreme Court and could be passing legislation, that's an ongoing mystery for many political and legal experts.
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