High-Coup

On By Nick ArmstrongIn Nick Armstrong

We are witnessing a coup of the US Government playing out in real-time. Again.

What’s happening is an unprecedented power grab rooted in bad faith, with the intent to defraud the American public, undermine and privatize American institutions, erode the Constitution, and subvert the separation of powers of the US Government.

The technical term for that is coup. Expert after expert after expert after expert after expert is calling this a coup and it’s our job to listen.

While I feel that there are many things President Trump is doing that are divisive, shameful, and detrimental to American society, especially his unscientific anti-trans, anti-immigrant, and anti-DEI policies, for the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on documented actions that show a blatant disregard for the US Constitution, laws, norms, and precedents, which illustrate President Trump’s willful attempt to conduct a second coup against the US Government (and yes, I mean second).

Want to make the Government more efficient?

Awesome, me too, and according to a September 2024 Gallup poll, most Americans agree with that premise.

Efficiency is a laudable goal and there is a way our Constitution says it can be done.

Breaking the law, breaking the systems without understanding them and without a plan to transition between old and new, or even allowing time or buffer to minimize harm or ensure basic security protocols and vetting are performed, all while lying about the level of access procured, wholesale erasing and editing critical governmental data, and ignoring the other branches of government are not part of that process.

It’s all as dubious as thinking an Executive Order could unilaterally overwrite the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution (it can’t).

Please be very aware: none of this is legal, none of this is normal, and none of this is happening in good faith. The Treasury’s threat intelligence team is called DOGE, “the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”

This is a coup.

We’re learning that DOGE contractors and Trump appointees lied about “read-only” access to critical treasury data while also not having proper security clearances, and the legally obligated protectors of that data were put on leave after attempting to stop DOGE contractors from access.

We’re learning that the Trump administration is subverting judicial authority as states report that they STILL cannot access Federal funds that had been frozen by the administration.

Elon Musk has DIRECT conflicts of interest and despite assurances that where conflicts of interest exist, his power will be curbed, in many cases, Elon or DOGE is directly targeting agencies that have either presented roadblocks to his financial interests, were investigating his business interests (USAID), present opportunities to grow his interests as in the case of the FAA and NOAA to support SpaceX and CFPB to support X’s new payment integration with Visa, and now via his access at the Treasury, Musk has the ability to withhold payments from competitor contractors.

The folks who could have provided a little insight into his authority or powers rejected the opportunity.

If any of this had been done with honest intent, the first and foremost place to evaluate for waste (a function already performed by GAO) is government contracting and corporate tax breaks (aka corporate welfare), which alone has been shown to cost American taxpayers nearly $100B a year. There are a lot of different ideas out there for responsible management of the budget, and each carries difficult choices. None of the models recommend subverting the constitution and congressional funding authority or a wholesale gutting of entire agencies willy-nilly based on ideological culture-war imperatives.

“Move fast and break things” isn’t a sustainable governing policy.

Instead, what’s happening is already undermining US authority and has already caused direct harm and increased the likelihood of human trafficking.

All of this is in bad faith. Good faith efforts don’t involve:

Just a kind reminder here to take a deep breath.

Bad faith arguments from supporters are treating “DOGE’s single biggest breach of US government data ever” as if it were just another daily occurrence. The argument from supporters that everybody should “just calm down” and let this play out downplays the mounting anxiety and alarm from experts, officials, and judges.

Four years ago, I wrote the following after President Trump’s failed first coup:

“Honest intent is the lifeblood of democracy, empowered by respect for each other and ideas bigger than each of us despite the fact that the paths to implementing those ideas may be divergent; freedom is poisoned by lies and conspiracy theories, peace deteriorates through the disregard of a common set of facts.”

Arguments that violation of privacy is commonplace don’t hold water. At all.

“Your credit card company has your data.” The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protected Americans from around $6B annually in junk fees in 2023, provides personal data privacy protection laws.

“Medicare/Your Doctor/Walgreens/Wealth Manager Overseeing Your Social Security has your data.” Our privacy there is protected by HIPAA, which is regulated by the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration has its own data protection violation laws, which state it’s a felony to obtain a record under false pretenses and a misdemeanor to procure it without proper notice requirements.

“Your Accountant has your data.” It’s a felony for anyone to misuse your tax return data.

Also understand that anyone performing a service for you has an obligation to you called a “duty of care”. It’s the idea that a reasonable standard of service is required to prevent any action that would cause harm. The entire business world works on this premise.

Let’s be very clear: as a business owner, if I were to dive into a client’s website – even with the CEO’s blessing – and rip out all the plugins without any notice to customers, change content without regard to SEO, and disable the payment system while also having no allocated budget to fix it and no plan to put it back better (other than just thinking I could), the damage to the brand and business would be material enough to fire me immediately. Those actions would be an unquestionable violation of my duty of care.

Expertise, process, and systems matter.

They matter because expertise, processes, and systems are relevant to duty of care. When they’re violated, chaos ensues, and the damage to our country becomes difficult to fix.

A perfect example is the outing of recent CIA agent hires via unclassified email to comply with a Trump executive order in a move one former agency officer called a “counterintelligence disaster.” There’s a reason why we don’t out CIA agents via unclassified email.

DOGE team members are currently in violation of at least two of the above laws via their access to Federal data and are facing an ongoing lawsuit because of it. I would argue their duty of care to US citizens, even as “special government employees” or whatever authority they’ve been extended, is to conduct themselves according to existing laws and regulations. They haven’t. They aren’t.

Worse, what’s happening in the US Government right now, thanks to the Trump administration, is virtually identical to the playbook that Hungary’s Orban used to subvert democracy there.

Autocracy starts with Executive overreach.

The Executive branch has zero authority per the US Constitution to undermine Congressional authority to allocate funds. That’s called impoundment and after Nixon tried it, Congress created a law about it (which Trump is currently violating).

Congressional authority is required to establish, fund, or eliminate an independent agency of the US Government. Elon Musk has none. An executive order alone cannot undo entire agencies any more than a President or a President’s designee, and we see in real-time that the Judicial branch of the Government is in full-throated agreement that the Executive Branch cannot act with unitary authority.

The fact that President Trump is ignoring a Judiciary Branch ruling limiting his Executive Branch power puts us squarely in the realm of a constitutional crisis. It’s rolling from the Treasury to USAID, to NOAA, to the Department of Education, to CFPB with zero oversight or accountability, and even lawmakers are being denied access, all while false claims and misinformation are running rampant and being used to justify the smash and grab of independent government agencies.

Parallel to those efforts is the weaponization of the Justice Department, ostensibly the enforcement arm of the Executive Branch. US Attorney General Pam Bondi has released a set of memos essentially weaponizing the DOJ against private business by criminally prosecuting private entities that implement Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEI/DEIA) policies. Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid writes there’s “no legal argument, no legal theory, and no practical example as to what crime has been committed that she’s targeting. She cites no example of alleged discrimination that has occurred that the Civil Rights Division is working to stop. […] This is fascism, plain and simple.”

Slashing DOE and NIH are BAD ideas rooted in bad policy.

It’s clear from his approach that the President has – at best – a murky understanding of what the Department of Education does.

Want to know the big 3 things the Department of Education spends money on?

  1. Special Ed Funding ($15B)
  2. Title I Funding for rural schools that are chronically underfunded ($18B)
  3. PELL Grants for sending lower-income kids to college + trade schools ($120B).

Eliminating DOE and returning funds to states harms the most vulnerable students and means that “poorer” states will almost certainly not have the same opportunities (and almost all of those states are bright-red Republican states).

Similarly, slashing the NIH budget for research infrastructure will have a wide-ranging negative impact on the economy of every state with a research university. Here’s a tool to find the impact of NIH Funding on your state, and Colorado’s data below:

NIH Awards Funding: $575 million
Jobs Supported: 7,142
Economic Activity Supported: $1.56 billion

Top 5 Disease-Related Causes of Death in Colorado

  • Heart Disease – 8,081 deaths
  • Cancer – 8,058 deaths
  • COVID-19 – 5,299 deaths
  • Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases (CLRD) – 2,306 deaths
  • Stroke – 2,045 deaths

Top NIH-Funded Institutions in Colorado

  • University of Colorado System
  • Colorado State University System
  • National Jewish Health
  • University of Denver (Colorado Seminary)
  • Crestone, Inc.
  • Klein Buendel, Inc.
  • Bolder Biotechnology, Inc.
  • Lohocla Research Corporation
  • Access Sensor Technologies, LLC
  • AmideBio, LLC

Bio Industry Impact in Colorado

  • Jobs: 37,692
  • Businesses: 3,329

Most Americans oppose Project 2025 priorities.

Project 2025 priorities (including eliminating the Department of Education) are not what most Americans voted for. Despite this, the Trump administration’s executive orders mirror much of what was planned in Project 2025 (even though he claimed he had never heard of it) and has just appointed one of the architects of Project 2025 to lead the White House Budget Office.

Combine the rampant Executive overreach with President Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 goals and widespread pardon of the January 6th rioters and the Department of Justice erasing records that it ever happened to begin with, raising the ire of judges and historians alike… and you have an administration that is in a full-fledged embrace and celebration of lawlessness.

We’re witnessing a sweeping, authoritarian coup of the US Government.

Musk’s expanding role triggers efforts to check his power

Republicans have control over both houses of Congress and the Executive branch. Any and all of these actions could have been done “by the book” from a place of honest intent and would have been met with (at least a little) bipartisan support, and we saw with the election that this seems to be a public priority. Governors from both parties stepped up and suggested early on they’d be willing to engage on efforts for efficiency and discussing issues.

Instead… we have chaos.

The chaos caused just by the “funding freeze” EO and memo (the memo which was later retracted) persists. Here’s an excerpt from a letter from Colorado Creative Industries to grant recipients addressing the funding freeze chaos:

“CCI Colorado Creates is a program that receives federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. […] Please be aware that the State encourages grant recipients to incur only those expenses that are necessary to the continuing operation of their program. The State recognizes that the federal government’s actions have created substantial uncertainty and is continuing to evaluate all of its options to ensure the federal government meets its commitments. The State intends to continue to honor its payment obligations under the federally funded grants it has awarded so long as the federal government continues to make the associated funds available.”

In plain English: nonprofits putting on arts and culture events, comic conventions, creative science programs, music events, plays, dance shows, art exhibits, and otherwise paying creatives in your hometown… they’re being told to tread water as much as possible.

When 22 states and the District of Columbia had to rise up to sue the Federal government because a memo caused $3T worth of chaos ranging from Meals on Wheels pausing delivering food to seniors to childhood cancer researchers not knowing if they could keep experiments going. Is that making America great again?

You’re seeing State AGs sue because the Executive Branch is ignoring the Judiciary Branch’s order telling them that the EO + Memo are not constitutional… states still can’t access the funding that your elected officials allocated.

Process and systems matter. Overriding them is chaotic and dangerous.

Doing so while also eliminating all the watchdogs (Inspectors General) creates a VERY dangerous situation that leads to abuse of dedicated civil servants – which we are seeing in real-time as dedicated civil servants leave instead of weather the storm (even though the buyout is legally and fiscally dubious and funding has not been allocated by Congress).

Commit to educating your friends, family, neighbors, fellow businesspeople at mixers, you name it. Call it what it is: a coup.

Here are some fantastic resources to help you spread the word about what’s going on:

Autocracy thrives in chaos, but finding common ground is the first step to fighting it. Find something to care about and work to educate others who also care:

Be kind when sharing facts. Reiterate that none of this is normal and experts across the country and in multiple branches of Government and an entire coalition of Federal employees are raising the alarm daily. It’s a full coup of the Federal government happening at break-neck speed because *that is the playbook* and it’s happening against the will of the majority of the American public.

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