Now that the Second Trump Administration is going through the vast federal bureaucracy looking to root out waste, fraud, and abuse through the innovative DOGE, there is a sudden interest in Congressional independence. On ABC's This Week, that hypocritical sudden interest was swiftly called out.
This is how that segment ended: with ABC’s Terry Moran decrying what he perceived as the subservience and submissiveness of Congress in the face of massive cuts across agencies falling under the purview of the Executive Branch (click “expand” to view transcript).
"WHERE WERE Y'ALL IN THE LAST ADMINISTRATION?", asks @whignewtons of ABC's Terry Moran subsequent to his whiny call for Congress to assert independence over DOGE. pic.twitter.com/B6ELxtADdY
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 9, 2025
MARTHA RADDATZ: But you heard the voters, Terry. You heard those voters, the Trump supporters. It's like that's Donald Trump, not -- the harshness didn't seem, in most cases, to bother.
TERRY MORAN: And more importantly, they want they voted -- they want to see action and they're getting action. The question is, is it lawful and one of the problems is the Congress, you know, one of the things that the Framers did when they set up three branches of government, they said this will be good because each branch will be as they said jealous of their powers and prerogatives.
And so you'll get the checks and balances that they're supposed to avoid concentrations of power. This Congress is on its knees run by, you know, the constitutional office of the speaker of the House, totally subservient, totally submissive, and they are not defending the powers and prerogatives of Congress.
Congress should stand up and say, wait, we have the power of the purse. We're Article I for a reason. The Framers wanted most policy-making government coming from the branch closest to the people. And as long as Congress is silent, we'll see what Article III, what the courts --
SARAH ISGUR: Where were y’all in the last administration?
That’s a valid question from former Department of Justice spokesperson Sarah Isgur. And if you look at Moran’s body language, Moran was stung by the question.
Where were the media on anything over the past four years? On Afghanistan, on the obvious physical and mental decline of Joe Biden and subsequent conspiracy to conceal these from the American people, on the cornucopia of criminality emerging from the Hunter Biden laptop: on these and a slew of other issues, not only were the media absent but were silent co-conspirators in the ongoing stew of lawlessness that was the Biden presidency.
The media’s silence was especially true with regard to Biden’s various student loan forgiveness schemes. There was an incuriosity with Congressional independence and separation of powers that seems to have vanished now that DOGE is on the scene. This is particularly true of Moran, who never whined about the submissiveness of the Democratic Congress while Biden (or his handlers) expanded executive power.
Isgur’s question stands. Where were they?
Click “expand” to view the full aforementioned panel segment as aired on This Week on Sunday, February 9th, 2025:
MARTHA RADDATZ: I want to turn to USAID. We paid a lot of attention to that. People are very alarmed here and especially overseas.
Susan, do we have an idea of what this will look like? At one point, they did- a talk about rolling it into the State Department. You heard Senator Murphy say that's a lie.
SUSAN GLASSER: Yeah. I mean, Martha, we've been subjected to I think almost a kind of Orwellian picture this week of literally workers being sent out to erase the name of USAID from the stone walls outside of the headquarters. This was not a policy fight.
You know, we can have a policy discussion about what's the best way for America to have soft power in the world, what programs there should be, what there shouldn't. We have a process for that. It's called the United States Congress, and in conjunction with the executive branch negotiating. This was an execution, not a policy fight.
And to me, it's very telling that they selected a target that may well be very unpopular with the American people, but it seems to me that this is a template for how they are looking to go after other executive agencies. And in fact, Elon Musk continues every way -- every day to tweet a list out, essentially of what's next.
There's no process here. It's not an on the level policy conversation, and I think that's very important for people to understand. I get that in Washington, we care about process, and out in the world, people care about outcomes.
But this is one where the process and the outcome meet, because the United States has just dismantled in effect the largest foreign assistance organization in the world. Nearly -- more than half of that assistance of about $40 billion a year, about half of that more goes to public health around the world; it goes to monitoring diseases and things like that.
And the question is how is it possible that one unelected billionaire, the richest man in the world can unilaterally do that without any process?
RADDATZ: You know, one of the things, Asma, that the Trump administration will say is: look, he campaigned on this. Elon Musk was at his side throughout this. “We want to cut government.” A lot of this we've seen optics. Just -- just what Susan was saying, too, like, more than optics but ripping the sign down off the USAID.
ASMA KHALID: And he never said USAID.
RADDATZ: Yeah, he never said USAID, that's exactly right.
KHALID: I mean, there was this broad vision of essentially trying to eliminate federal bureaucracy, streamline things. He did campaign on that. He campaigned on cracking down against sort of gender identity as we seeing him follow through this week. These are things that he said he would do but I think the speed and scope of just things we have seen this week is unprecedented.
And then to Susan's point -- I mean, I was speaking with a USAID staffer this week or maybe I call them a former staffer at this point, who said to me they were emailed at 12:42 a.m., in the middle of the night, to not appear at work the next day. This isn't the process of Congress sitting there and going through to assess what budgetary, perhaps, limitations they ought to put on USAID.
This is the case of -- as Susan said -- the richest man in the world and there's something very strange about him slashing programs that prevent starvation and hunger and poverty in much of the world.
RADDATZ: But you heard the voters, Terry. You heard those voters, the Trump supporters. It's like that's Donald Trump, not -- the harshness didn't seem, in most cases, to bother.
TERRY MORAN: And more importantly, they want they voted -- they want to see action and they're getting action. The question is, is it lawful and one of the problems is the Congress, you know, one of the things that the Framers did when they set up three branches of government, they said this will be good because each branch will be as they said jealous of their powers and prerogatives.
And so you'll get the checks and balances that they're supposed to avoid concentrations of power. This Congress is on its knees run by, you know, the constitutional office of the speaker of the House, totally subservient, totally submissive, and they are not defending the powers and prerogatives of Congress.
Congress should stand up and say, wait, we have the power of the purse. We're Article I for a reason. The Framers wanted most policy-making government coming from the branch closest to the people. And as long as Congress is silent, we'll see what Article III, what the courts --
SARAH ISGUR: Where were y’all in the last administration?
