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Over the first 16 days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk and a small team at the “Department of Government Efficiency” has systematically started to dismantle the agencies that keep the country running. DOGE workers have taken multiple actions that experts say are illegal, from accessing private taxpayer data to pushing workers out of their jobs. Musk (and Trump’s) power grab has arguably created a constitutional crisisand seems likely to only get worse. “This is totally outside the bounds of the way the federal government should operate, and is required by law to operate,” says says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. So far, no one has stopped Musk. But it’s possible that lawsuits that are now underway could succeed. Musk is behind a push to try to get two million federal workers to quit their jobsincluding air traffic controllers, in an email that went out the day after a plane crash in D.C. killed 67 people. (This happened despite the fact that 90% of airports currently have a shortage of workers.) Only after a second plane crashed in Philadelphia, a day later, were air traffic controllers exempted from the general effort to try to get federal employees to take buyouts. An email sent by DOGE officials claimed that workers who took buyouts would get paid through September if they agreed to quit this month. As of Tuesday, at least 20,000 workers had agreed to leavebut the government doesnt have the funding to pay them, and DOGE doesn’t legally have the authority to make the buyout offer in the first place. Meanwhile, some roles that cover vital day-to-day work will go unfilled. Some agencies, like the Justice Department and FBI, have seen firings that are also likely illegal. Musks team also reportedly accessed classified information at USAID, the international aid agency, without the proper clearance; the security officers who tried to stop them were put on leave. Musk later said that he spent the weekend putting USAID into the wood chipper, and that the humanitarian agency, which has saved millions of lives, was a criminal organization and it was time for it to die. On Friday, USAID announced that its 10,000 employees will be put on administrative leave. DOGE also reportedly accessed private Treasury payment systems that contain Americans personal data, including tax information and social security numbers, despite potential conflicts of interest with his own businesses and the risk that the data could fall into the wrong hands. Another career official was placed on leave for trying to prevent Musk’s teamincluding some college-age programmers with no government experiencefrom seeing the data. That band of personnel is barreling in to agencies across the government, upending security and privacy and confidentiality protections and established procedures, to gain access to databases that in many cases contain vast amounts of sensitive personal information from the general public and from federal employees, says Davisson. And they are doing this to remake the federal government in their preferred manner, regardless of what Congress has ordained. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a crowd gathered in front of the U.S. Treasury Department in protest of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency on February 4, 2025. [Photo: Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images] ‘The approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law’ Much of DOGEs work is illegal, experts say. “Basically, the approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law,” says Laura Dickinson, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School who focuses on national security and human rights. “A lot of what his team is doing appears to be illegal, and they’re putting the burden of challenging this on people that are harmed.” DOGE is potentially breaking multiple laws. Its access to taxpayer information, for example, “is very likely illegal under the Privacy Act and under aspects of the Internal Revenue Code, which guarantee confidentiality of information,” Dickinson says. “There’s also a case to be made that it could violate the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, which has some cybersecurity protection. The issue here is just that that personal data is very closely regulatedwho can have access to it, for privacy reasons, but also for security reasons. It’s really quite dangerous to kind of change the process for handling that data. There could be greater exposure to hackers and others.” In the case of USAID, because it was established by Congress, Musk and Trump don’t get to choose whether or not it survives. Theres no current authority for this president, or any president, to abolish USAID, says David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University with expertise in administrative and constitutional law. So hes flatly disregarding a binding statute of Congress. The administration has folded USAID into the State Department, something that it also doesn’t have the authority to do. Now Musk’s team is also targeting the Department of Education, which Trump reportedly wants to shut down via executive order. The DOGE team also showed up at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday, reportedly accessing computer systems with more confidential information. Project 2025 called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized.” Like USAID, the president doesn’t have the legal authority to close either department. DOGE also doesnt have the authority to tell employees to quit. Federal law does allow for buyouts, but only if an agency decides that it wants to staff to leave early and submits a plan to the Office of Personnel Management and gets the plan aproved. DOGE has created something entirely different, without any legal authority, in which they are effectively promising federal employees that they will be paid for doing no work between now and the end of September, Super says. Making such a promise is illegal, and they also have no authority to keep the promise even if they wanted to. (Unions representing federal workers have warned that the buyout offers are scams, and that workers are unlikely to actually get paid.) Lawsuits are underway Because the work is illegal, lawsuits are part of the answer. Federal employee unions sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for allowing DOGE access to sensitive data. The largest union also sued over the buyout offers, saying that the policy is “pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.” Public Citizen, an advocacy group, is suing over DOGE’s violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a law that requires public meetings and more transparency over what the government does. More lawsuits will come. USAID workers could sue, and so could recipients of funding from USAID, including contractors who work for the agency. Anyone who’s affected, including citizens, could potentially sue. “For example, if there is someone who is signed up to get extension courses from the Agriculture Department and those courses are cut off because of the illegal change in the job responsibilities of the people who were supposed to teach that course, people could absolutely sue,” says Super. It’s possible that some court cases could move quickly, in the same way that a court almost immediately blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze all federal funding. “That doesn’t mean that there won’t be serious harm,” Super says. “We’ve heard of AIDS treatment programs overseas and other things that desperately need continuity that have been shut down. All the people whose lives have been upendedpeople who are wondering how they’re going to make their mortgage, having taken jobs with the federal government often for less than the private sector would offer, expecting the job security that federal law provides themnow seeing their lives upset.” Still, he says “lawsuits can stop these things quite quickly.” Though this also requires the Trump administration obeying the rulings of the court. Congress also needs to act, says Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO of RepresentUS, a nonprofit that fights corruption. “It’s urgent that Congress do its job,” she says. “They are responsible for exercising oversight over the executive branch.” Although several Congresspeople have spoken upSenator Brian Schatz, for example, vowed to put a blanket hold on nominees for the State Department to protest what’s happening to USAIDthe majority still haven’t. “Nobody should be silent in the face of this,” Sanchez-Moreno says. “And frankly, this should not be a partisan issue. This is about very traditional, historically conservative values of rule of law and preventing corruption and abuse of authority and respecting the constitution.” In her past work in international human rights, she says she saw firsthand how important it was to act. “These sorts of issues are easier to address earlier than laterI say that having worked on autocracy and corruption in many parts of the world,” she says. “Once you have attacks on the rule of law, if it’s not protected in a pretty strong way, it can be harder to recover it.” Everything DOGE has done follows the playbook that Musk has taken at his own companies, where he’s skirted labor laws and ignored safety regulations. In some cases, he’s gotten away with it. The stakes are obviously higher now. “This is a fast-rolling catastrophe,” says Davisson. “It is happening right now and demands an immediate response. I think all of our business in Congress should be put to the side and stalled wherever possible until this gross criminality and illegality is corrected and the DOGE is forced out of these systems.”
Category:
E-Commerce
A sweeping new U.S. tariff on products made in China is expected to increase the prices American consumers pay for a wide array of products, from the ultra-cheap apparel sold on online shopping platforms to toys and electronic devices such as computers and cellphones.An additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods took effect Tuesday, while the U.S. Postal Service announced it will stop accepting parcels inbound from China and Hong Kong until further notice.The previous day, President Donald Trump agreed to pause his threatened tariffs against Mexico and Canada for 30 days following negotiations on Trump’s demands for the North American nations to take steps to reduce illegal immigration and the flow of drugs such as fentanyl into the U.S.After failing to get a similar White House reprieve, China struck back with retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. goods that are set to begin next week.The sheer volume and variety of the China-made merchandise sold in the U.S. means residents would probably see the prices of many typically inexpensive items tick higher if the tit-for-tat tariffs persist.These are some of the products most likely to be impacted: Electronics, home supplies and car parts The U.S. imported about $427 billion worth of goods from China in 2023, the most recent year with complete data, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Consumer electronics, including cellphones, computers and other tech accessories, make up the biggest import categories.China is a dominant production engine for tech gear, including for American companies like Apple that have their products assembled in the country. In 2023, China accounted for 78% of U.S. smartphone imports and 79% of laptop and tablet imports, the Consumer Technology Association trade group reported.The tariffs also may affect how much consumers pay for typically inexpensive clothing, shoes and kitchen items like pots and pans, as well as the big-ticket items, such as appliances, furniture and auto parts.Jay Salaytah, 43, who runs his own auto repair shop in Detroit, said he bought some pieces of equipment sooner than he might have, anticipating they would cost more if Trump implemented his campaign promise to use import tariffs as a tool to promote U.S. manufacturing.“I knew the costs were going to go up, and these are manufactured in China,” Salaytah said of a probe test light he purchased before Tuesday’s tariff went into effect. Low-cost apparel and accessories In addition to imposing a new tariff on Chinese imports, Trump’s executive order also suspended a little-known trade exemption that allowed goods worth less than $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free. The order left open the possibility for the loophole to still be used with shipments from other countries.The trade rule, known as “de minimis,” has existed for nearly a century. It came under greater scrutiny in recent years due to the rapidly growing number of low-cost items coming into the U.S. from China, mainly from prominent China-founded online retailers such as Shein, Temu and Alibaba’s AliExpress.Former President Joe Biden’s administration proposed a crackdown on the loophole in September, but the rules did not take effect before Biden left office.Shein and Temu have gained global popularity by offering a quickly updated assortment of ultra-inexpensive clothes, accessories, gifts and gadgets shipped mostly from China, allowing the two e-commerce companies to compete on the home turf of American companies.Seattle-based Amazon is trying to compete with them through an online storefront that mimics their business model by offering cheap products shipped directly from China.Chinese exports of low-value packages soared to $66 billion in 2023, up from $5.3 billion in 2018, according to report released last week by the Congressional Research Service. In the U.S., Temu and Shein comprise about 17% of the discount market for fast fashion, toys and other consumer goods, the report said. How much will prices go up? It’s unclear. Under de minimis, Shein, Temu and AliExpress could bypass taxes collected by customs authorities. But under the changes effective Tuesday, company shipments from China will now be subject to existing duties plus the new 10% tariff imposed by Trump, analysts said.“The vast majority of these orders are valued less than $800, which means all or virtually all of them are going to get caught in that,” Youssef Squali, an analyst at Truist Financial, said.Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said he thinks the price increases on platforms like Shein and Temu will be “pretty small” and the products they sell will remain cheap. However, the rule change is likely to result in delivery delays since the packages now have to go through customs, Kaziukenas said.The new tariffs will also hit third-party sellers on Amazon that import products from China, according to Squali. He expects sellers to eat some of the costs and pass the rest onto customers, which he thinks could result in percentage price increases in the mid-single digits. Other e-commerce sites that host businesses, such as Etsy, are also going to be impacted, Squali said.Temu, which is owned by China’s PDD Holdings, has previously said its growth did not depend on the de minimis policy. Though most of its products are shipped from China, Temu has been recruiting Chinese merchants to store inventory in the U.S., a move that experts said would allow it to not be as exposed to changes around the trade rule.In January, China also introduced measures to help cross-border e-commerce build overseas warehousing by offering them tax rebates or tax exemptions What are US retailers saying? The day after November’s U.S. presidential election, Brieane Olson, CEO of teen clothing chain PacSun, went to Hong Kong to meet with factory executives to figure out ways to prepare for Trump’s tariff plan.Roughly 35% to 40% of PacSun’s garments are made in China, even as the chain has accelerated moves to diversify with suppliers in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam.But Olson said Trump’s 10% tariff on Chinese goods was less extreme than the company anticipated. For now, PacSun doesn’t plan to increase prices on its products or move its manufacturing of knitwear and denim out of China.Toys are another category of consumer products that relies heavily on imports from China. Greg Ahearn, the president and CEO of The Toy Association trade group, said he thinks toy companies that source in China are going to absorb the cost of the new tariff in the short term.Eventually, those price hikes will be moved onto the consumer, Ahearn said. Associated Press writers Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, and Christopher Rugaber and Didi Tang in Washington contributed to this report. Haleluya Hadero, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
In the first weeks of Donald Trumps second term in office, Elon Musk has been busy seizing control of instruments of government power, causing many to wonder who is really in charge. Elon Musk is President, The Atlantics Jonathan Lemire declared. There has never been a private citizen like him. Newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently granted Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to a highly sensitive computer systemdescribed as a a checkbook for the entire federal governmentthat distributes trillions of dollars annually. Musk, flanked by a cadre of young engineers with no government experience, as Wired has reported, are hacking away at sensitive federal systems likely without proper security clearance. Naturally, Musk and his ragtag child army have raised bright red flags around Washington. So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think theyre playing a quantity game and assuming the system cant react to all this illegality at once, Georgetown Law professor David Super told the Washington Post in response to Musks blitz on the federal government. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden asked the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday to open an inquiry into Bessents granting DOGE access to the Treasury payment system. In a separate letter sent to Bessent last week, Wyden wrote, I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems. But Wydens concern also highlighted another major conflict of interest that makes Musks powers worrying: his ties to China. I am concerned Musks enormous business operations in Chinaa country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systemsendangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk, he wrote. Wyden cited a recent Chinese breach of the Treasury Departments systems in which hackers accessed former Secretary Janet Yellens emails. While most American companies do notor cannotoperate in China, Musks Tesla certainly does. In 2024, the electric carmaker sold 657,000 cars in China, up 8.8% from the year before. It also operates massive car and battery manufacturing facilities in Shanghai. The company received several unusual concessions from the Chinese government, Wyden noted, letting Tesla operate independently without a joint venture with a Chinese partner, favorable loans, and a discounted corporate tax rate of 15% in China, something that could change quickly if Musk were to anger the Chinese government. In January, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Musk, urging Tesla and other U.S. companies to seize the opportunity and share in the fruits of China’s development. Musk vowed to deepen investment cooperation with China. And with Musk helming the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency in charge of foreign aid and assistance, critics have warned that Americas retreat could create pathways for China to expand its influence abroad. The Trump administration has just put America last, while handing a gift to our biggest adversaries, notably China, Michael Schiffer, former USAID assistant administrator in Asia, wrote in Just Security. Americas alliances will suffer. U.S. partners will be at risk. And Americas enemies will rejoice. With the U.S. and China on the brink of exacerbating its ongoing trade war, the man running behind the scenes and fiddling with the bells, knobs, and whistles of the U.S. government has no electoral mandate, no real position, no proper security clearance, and deep conflicts of interest with his business. What could go wrong?
Category:
E-Commerce
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