The actual law is a high dimensional interaction of all active legislation. Predicting what the legal system will do is hard and often cannot be achieved with high reliability with a google search.

This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield useful prediction making capability.

Also malicious compliance is an option. Maybe they could name a single person the official administrator, given them an office in a basement and officially comply, while effectively shutting everything down. The extent to which fulfilling the intent of legislation vs relying on the discretion of the executive to interpret it within, and as a matter of precedent deferring to executive discretion by default in court cases, probably enables many more abuses than have been contemplated prior to this presidency.

Unless they are paying that person in the basement the full funding of what Congress has budgetted for USAID that's Impoundment. If they are then it's still Impoundment because it's been redirected from it's original purpose.

The OP asserted that USAID was created by EO and that the president is free to do what he wants with it. That statement is blatantly false. How does court decide is not relevant to this discussion, because as you said it is speculative.

>> It ... can of course also be transformed through one.

> The OP asserted that ... the president is free to do what he wants with it.

What's blatantly false is your restatement of what OP said. Transformed != do what he wants.

Well my luck, turns out he can't do transformations either.

> Sec. 7063. (a) Prior Consultation and Notification.--Funds appropriated ... may not be used to implement a reorganization, redesign, or other plan described in subsection (b) by ... the United States Agency for International Development ... without prior consultation ... with the appropriate congressional committees.

> (b) ... a reorganization, redesign, or other plan shall include any action to

> (1) expand, eliminate, consolidate, or downsize covered departments, agencies ...

> (2) expand, eliminate, consolidate, or downsize the United States official presence overseas ...

> (3) expand or reduce the size of the permanent Civil Service, Foreign Service, eligible family member, and locally employed staff workforce of the Department of State and USAID from the staffing levels previously justified to the Committees on Appropriations for fiscal year 2024.

It's remarkable how much effort some people put into portraying this as a 'highly complex' legal issue. In reality, laws like this one typically include standard boilerplate provisions precisely to prevent situations like the current one, regardless of the administration. A simple Google search is actually enough to establish what one _should do_ here according to the law.

Claiming that this is complex isn't just a matter of disagreement; it's a deliberate distortion of language and intent. This approach dismisses a clear legal bright line in favor of framing the issue through power dynamics and a 'what can I get away with' mindset. Without independent or ethical agents of enforcement or a process that's interested in keeping up, what we can get away with ends up being a lot and will likely be substantially impactful.