Numerous decisions by the new Trump government are now being negotiated before American courts. But that takes time. In contrast to the first Trump-Amtszeit, hardly anyone goes to the street.
He is frustrated and disappointed, says an employee of the development aid authority USAID in Washington. Ex-employees, you have to say, because his workplace should be canceled, like thousands of other government jobs.
The man does not want to give his name, he still has a rest hope that it cannot be true for USAID.
But it looks bad for tens of thousands of employees of these and other authorities and ministries that Elon Musk searches through Donald Trump on behalf of Donald Trump.
Musk advertises for a new course
Trump and Musk have just won a victory for them in court. They had pushed more than two million federal employees by email to voluntarily terminate.
Unions had complained. A federal court dismissed the lawsuit. Musk can continue to advertise that federal employees go on their own.
If you leave now, you can still get money until September, you can just do what you want and look for another job, he says in an online video. “In the end, a lot of inefficient government jobs and have gone into productive jobs in the private sector.” This is Musk's world: the government should work like a private company.
Only isolated protests
“Elon Musk has to go”, call a few hundred or a few thousand demonstrators in Washington on some days. There are individual protests, also in other cities, but they are usually only those directly affected whose jobs are threatened.
Eight years ago, half a million people had demonstrated around Trump's first inauguration of Trump alone in Washington – this time there is no trace of such mass protests.
Democrats without a leading figure
It is a process of getting used to Trump and the exhaustion of the opposition, some democrats admit – even if senators like Chris Murphy from Connecticut speak loudly and speak of “constitutional crisis”.
“We must not make this normal that the richest man in the world ultimately leads the government,” said Murphy on the television station CNN, “that Musk enforces things that also serve his own companies and make it even richer”.
But the Democrats are currently missing the leadership figure, they are in the minority in both congress chambers. And the Republicans are almost unconditionally behind Trump.
In order to counteract the criticism of the “Authority for Government Efficiency”, abbreviated Doge, they have only created a parliamentary control committee, the musk and its employees are supposed to commit to more transparency.
Height Approval rates for Trump
James Carafano from the Trump-related thought factory Heritage Foundation refers to the high consent rates for Trump in current surveys and says:
I think most Americans have a lot of understanding of reducing the government bureaucracy and do not see the role of Doge as really attacking or unconstitutional.
The Heritage Foundation had caused irritation in the election campaign with the “Project 2025”. A controversial government concept was presented on hundreds of pages.
And the dishes? There are also judgments that temporarily stop Trump's orders. However, the government usually objects. Until the highest instance, the Supreme Court decided, can pass months or years.
It is anything but safe whether the Supreme Court then decides against Trump.
