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Angus King represents Maine in the U.S. Senate.
This column was adapted from King’s speech on the Senate floor Thursday to urge the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to assert the legislative branch’s constitutional duty and authority.
The news from Washington is coming so hard and fast these days; it’s hard to sort it all out. Every day seems to be something new that captures our attention, our concern, our interest. So I’d like to try to put some of it in perspective, in a way that is nonpartisan, because it should not be partisan.
What I’m really talking about is competent government and constitutional government. These should not be controversial issues. Matter of fact, we shouldn’t even be arguing about the fact. In fact, as senators, we have a responsibility that we promised in our oath to the Constitution.
My concerns with our work here are the thoughtlessness and dangerousness we are seeing pushed through executive actions.
First, I want to talk about thoughtlessness — like the federal hiring freeze. A hiring freeze can be an effective tool if it’s used thoughtfully and systematically. But to do it across the board without a process for exceptions built into it, you end up with all kinds of unintended and negative consequences. Firefighters, parks and losses elsewhere by attrition. We’ve seen it firsthand here in Maine.
There should be a systematic exemption process instead of the haphazard and random process in place. Park seasonal employees were first under the hiring freeze, now they’re not. Veterans Administration frontline health workers were next. Then people said, oh, no, we didn’t mean doctors and nurses — you can hire them.
My point is, it’s not a rational process. It’s ready, fire, aim. That’s a huge problem. Because while people try to create a distinction between frontline deliverers of care at the VA and the people who answer the phone who are categorized as bureaucrats, I don’t think there’s a stark difference there. If you’re a veteran and are seeking care and an appointment at a VA health facility and nobody answers the phone, that’s a denial of benefits, just as if they close the door in your face. That’s what we’re talking about: Maine veterans not being able to access the care they so rightly deserve and earned.
Now, let me reiterate that it is possible to do a hiring freeze. When I was governor of Maine, I instituted a hiring freeze. But we did it in a systematic and thoughtful way. We had a process for dealing with exemptions and without destroying the morale and throwing the entire operation of government into chaos. And, by the way, why do we have the government? To serve the people of the United States and everyone right here at home in Maine.
So let’s talk about the next step: the firings. The famous fork in the road letter is a perfect example of a thoughtless way to approach a problem. The letter went to everybody and wasn’t selective. It went to everybody — all civilians in the CIA, in the National Security Agency, in the Defense Department. Also, of course, all the other civilian agencies. But it wasn’t targeted in a way. If you want to leave federal service, we’ll pay you through September. Again, it’s not a rational or thoughtful way to trim the federal workforce.
We should instead be talking about where are the places where we may have too many people. For example, where do we have overstock in terms of staffing and where do we need more? But no, this administration sent a resignation offer to everybody. By definition, that’s not a rational process.
The estimate as of today is 75,000 people have taken that option and left. I suppose the people who are behind this purge think that’s a great victory. The dollars saved from those 75,000 people represent one-tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget.
Not 1 percent, but 0.01 percent. Is that worth the chaos and the uncertainty and the deletion of services to our American people? I would argue that’s not worth it. One-tenth of 1 percent.
Everyone got these letters. People are being fired now in the CIA, FBI, the VA. Here’s a mental exercise: What if only the best people took the option to leave? You’ve encouraged people who were going to retire anyway or who could get a better job in the private sector. So it’s an anti-intelligent way to handle this.
Then you have situations like at the Department of Energy, the first weekend they fired 350 people in the National Nuclear Security Administration, the people who handle nuclear materials and are responsible for our nuclear stockpile. They fired I think it was something like 20 percent of the personnel.
Three or four days later, they realized that was a mistake. A good, solid, thoughtful process wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. They would have realized from the outset that these are jobs that we aren’t going to be firing, we aren’t going to be eliminating. It seemed to be based on some kind of quota.
Also, we are hearing that everybody being fired was categorized as being on “probationary status.” That category just means you’ve worked for the government for less than a year or two — not about your skill level or expertise. That’s the definition of being arbitrary.
You could be one of the best employees in the whole federal government, and yet you’re going to be fired. It has nothing to do with the productivity or skill of the worker. It has nothing to do with the importance of the position. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the agency in question or serving the people of Maine. If you’re probationary, you’re gone.
To make matters even worse, if you’re promoted because you’re an especially effective federal worker, you are on probation in the new position. You may have worked in the department for five or 10 years, you are classified as being “on probation” for a year. Those people? Many of them are fired, too, even if they have five or 10 years of experience. All these people got these ridiculous letters saying “your performance has not been adequate.” There was no basis for those letters. It was arbitrary. And that’s remember why I said the categories are thoughtless and dangerous.
Maine has one of the highest concentrations of veterans among our population — and we’re proud of that. That’s why this federal purge is especially awful, because about 30 percent of the federal workforce are veterans. Now, we don’t know the exact figures agency by agency; that’s one of the problems. We have no transparency about what’s going on here and who’s actually being let go and who isn’t. That said, a reasonable extrapolation is 30 percent of the people being fired are veterans. People who put their lives on the line for this country. And then they went into public service and they’re being fired. That’s outrageous.
Was no one thinking about this? A thousand people were fired at the VA just a couple of days ago. We learned that people supporting the VA crisis line were fired. What genius thought that was a good idea?
Last Friday, immigration judges were fired. Congress is debating how we need to address immigration and get control of the border, and we’re firing immigration judges? What possible sense does that make?
There’s so many examples why this is wrongheaded thinking. There’s also aviation. We’ve had at least three dangerous aircraft incidents in the last month, and they just fired I think 300 people at the Federal Aviation Administration, including people who are in the business of maintaining the systems that keep our airplanes safe. In the wake of three serious airplane crashes, including one here in Washington that killed 67 people, we’re firing people at the FAA?
Give me a break! What kind of sense does that make? What kind of service is that to the people of the United States? It’s not service; it’s dangerous.
While I’m talking about service, how about the National Park Service. 1,000 people were fired last weekend at the National Park Service. I suspect they were probationary, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t in jobs that were important. The headline in this morning’s paper: chaos at the national parks. The lines are twice as long. If there’s chaos at the national parks in February, lord knows what it’s going to be in June or July in Yosemite or in Acadia in my state of Maine.
The most ridiculous part of these cuts? Some of these people who are being fired are people who collect fees at the park. So to save a buck, we’re going to lose $5 from fees not being collected. Genius. Come on.
OK, that’s the thoughtless part. Let me give you a little personal experience. When I was elected governor of Maine, we had a serious deficit. We were in the middle of a recession. We went through a process very similar to the impetus for what’s going on now. We looked at the entire workforce of the state of Maine. But we did it in a thoughtful and transparent way. We developed a task force that included private citizens, legislators and members of the administration, and we took eight months — not one month like what we’re seeing from DOGE, but eight months. In doing so, we looked at the entire structure of the state government and reduced our workforce by about 10 percent, a significant reduction. But we did it in a thoughtful way and in a way that made sense in terms of the ongoing service to the people of Maine.
So it can be done, and I’m not unsympathetic with the idea of making things more efficient, and downsizing the government where it’s called for and where additional people aren’t necessary. So, I’m not here to say we shouldn’t be looking for efficiency and saying everything in the federal government is perfect. I don’t believe that for a minute. But I think if we’re going to take on this exercise, it ought to be done in a sensible way by people who know what they’re doing.
This brings me to DOGE. I don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody does. I don’t know who these 25-year-olds are in the IRS, rummaging around in the IRS IT system, and Social Security’s database. What are they doing? Who are they? What are their qualifications? Do they have security clearances? Do they have conflicts of interest?
All of the rules designed to protect us from people making arbitrary decisions that aren’t accountable, you talk about bureaucrats being unaccountable, these are the ultimate unaccountable people. We don’t know what their relationship is to the federal government, what authority they have, upon what law they’re operating. It’s clear from mistakes like firing 350 people at the Nuclear Security Agency, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re firing people who we need.
The second part of what’s going on is dangerous, and this is where I call on my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are standing by and watching our government be attacked with no response — attacking and gutting congressionally-created agencies. USAID was established by statute and over a weekend these DOGE people fired everybody, closed the agency, took the name off the door and threw the rest of the world into chaos, where these people were working on important projects all over the world that were part of our outreach to the world.
You know what? As soon as this administration cut USAID, China opportunistically entered the global marketplace and started wielding that soft power. We’re walking away from engagement with the world. It couldn’t be a more self-defeating approach.
James Mattis famously said, when he was a general, if you cut the foreign aid budget, you’re going to have to buy me more bullets. Foreign aid is part of the national security of this country, and to demolish this agency without any input from Congress, without any relationship to the Foreign Affairs Committee or anybody else up here in the Congress, is grossly unconstitutional. It’s grossly unconstitutional.
Here’s the problem, this isn’t just a battle between the Senate and the House and the president where we are fighting over the balance of power. This is an abdication of power. The reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power. They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided among the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure. And the structure wasn’t there for fun. It wasn’t, hey, we’ll design this complicated system. It was there to protect our freedom. Because the people that wrote our Constitution understood human nature, and they understood a very important thousand-year-old principle — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The whole idea was to divide power, and to the extent we allow this assault on our Constitution, this collapsing and excessive power being granted to the executive to ignore the laws passed by Congress, it’s just wrong and illegal. Appropriations bills are laws passed by Congress, which the administration is ignoring when it freezes funding for programs authorized and funded by Congress.
But we’re setting a horrific precedent here, and we’re not only making a mistake now, but we’re altering the essential structure of our Constitution that’s there for a reason, and to protect our freedom. And the people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened is we gave it up!
James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now, we’re just sitting back and watching it happen. The president said, Article 2 of the Constitution gives him a lot of power. No, it doesn’t — it makes the president commander-in-chief. Here’s the key sentence in Article 2 of the Constitution, which defines the president’s power, the key sentence is not the power of the president, it’s that “the responsibility of the president is to take care that the laws being faithfully executed.”
The Constitution doesn’t have the president write the laws, deny the laws, ignore the laws, or pick which laws he or she likes. The president’s job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That’s the responsibility of the president. And right now, those laws are being ignored.
Impoundment. The president is trying to say Congress appropriated this money through an appropriation bill signed by the president, but I’m not going to spend it because I don’t like it, I don’t like that purpose. That is absolutely unconstitutional and illegal.
President Richard Nixon tried to do that in 1973, and the Congress, virtually unanimously, passed the Impoundment Control Act, which said no, presidents can’t do that. They can’t ignore the will of Congress because Article 1 of the Constitution gives the Congress the power of the purse. We’re giving it away this week. We’re standing by and watching it, watching the essential power of this body evaporate. Not evaporate, migrate down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The power was divided for a reason. There’s criticism in the press saying people are talking about a constitutional crisis, saying they’re crying wolf. This is a constitutional crisis. It’s the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country. It’s the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country.
It is a constitutional crisis, and I’ll tell you what makes it worse, the president and the vice president are already hinting that they’re not going to obey decisions of the courts. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don’t want to buck the president and we’ll let the courts take care of it. That’s a cop out. It’s our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That’s what we swear to when we enter this body. To stand back and say we’re going to watch all this happen and the courts will take care of it is an abdication of our responsibility.
If you look at history, yes, it’s true, presidents have gained power. In my reading of history usually it wasn’t because presidents usurped power, but the Congress abdicated it. We haven’t declared war, for example, since 1942, yet that’s a clear responsibility of Congress and we sure have been in some scrapes since 1942. We’ve abdicated that power, and we’re now in the process of abdicating the power to control the appropriations process.
What’s it going to take for us to wake up, when I say us, I mean this entire body, to wake up to what’s going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the president has accreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What’s it going to take? The offenses keep piling up. As I said, leaving it to the courts is a cop out, especially when the president over the weekend famously quoted Napoleon, essentially saying “when you’re saving your country, you don’t have to obey any law.” Wow, a president of the United States quoting Napoleon about not having to obey the law.
This is a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it. I’m just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don’t do it this way. We don’t do it this way. We do things constitutionally. Yes, it’s more cumbersome, it’s slower, that’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for. This is a very dangerous moment. We’ve got to wake up and protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.