Can a president-elect simply speak a new federal agency into being? President-elect Trump apparently, like a dictator, believes he can, and that agency is the Department of Government Efficiency. No president can simply do this, but if anyone has said so to Trump he apparently isn’t listening.

He’s had these flights of fancy before. Calling his 2020 loss a massive fraud, he declared, without evidence, “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Similarly he falsely claimed to have declassified thousands of documents he illegally took in 2021 to Mar-a-Largo, as if top-secret plans for how to invade Iran were his own personal property to boast about and wave around in front of resort guests. There are clear procedures for declassifying top-secret documents. Trump never completed any of those at any time before or since the National Archives, the true owners by law, complained to him that records were missing, eventually initiating an FBI investigation and criminal indictment against the former president.

The Department of Government Efficiency doesn’t exist. His “nominees” to run it — two rich guys with no experience in government, no congressionally mandated department to run, no Senate confirmations — are already making demands on Congress affecting bipartisan support for children’s cancer research and threatening veterans benefits, Social Security and Medicare. Trump, a convicted felon and insurrectionist who constitutionally is disqualified from office, mocks the Constitution, Congress and the rule of law.

Stephen Demetriou
Waldoboro