Federal courts 'not likely to be sympathetic' to Musk’s proposed budget cuts: legal expert

Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are eager to fire thousands of federal government employees. The Hill recently reported that the billionaires' so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" may be in for a rude wake-up call from the federal courts, despite their belief that two Supreme Court decisions will help them demolish a slew of regulations on the private sector. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority," they wrote. University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley — a former chief legal counsel to Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer — said their op-ed "reflects a misunderstanding" of those decisions. “If what they’re saying is agencies can now adopt different regulations without going through the administrative process, because they think they’ve got some clincher of a legal argument, I think they’re going to find out very quickly that the courts are not likely to be sympathetic with cutting procedural corners.” Musk and Ramaswamy also argued in favor of abolishing a 1974 law prohibiting a president from using what's known as "impoundment," in which money authorized by Congress that has not been spent be returned to the U.S. Treasury.