When Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter over the weekend, it was seen as another move driven by the tech wing of the Republican Party — especially in light of the Copyright Office releasing a pre-publication report saying some kinds of generative AI training would not be considered fair use. And when two men showed up at the Copyright Office inside the Library of Congress carrying letters purporting to appoint them to acting leadership positions, the DOGE takeover appeared to be complete.
But those two men, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, were not DOGE at all, but instead approved by the MAGA wing of the Trump coalition that aims to put tech companies in check.
Perkins, now the supposed acting Register of Copyrights, is an eight-year veteran of the DOJ who served in the first Trump administration prosecuting fraud cases. Nieves, the putative acting deputy librarian, is currently at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, having previously been a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, where he worked with Rep. Jim Jordan on Big Tech investigations. And Todd Blanche, the putative Acting Librarian of Congress who would be their boss, is a staunch Trump ally who represented him during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial, and is now the Deputy Attorney General overseeing the DOJ’s side in the Google Search remedies case. As one government affairs lobbyist told The Verge, Blanche is “there to stick it to tech.”
The appointments of Blanche, Perkins, and Nieves are the result of furious lobbying over the weekend by the conservative content industry — as jealously protective of its copyrighted works as any other media companies — as well as populist Republican lawmakers and lawyers, all enraged that Silicon Valley had somehow persuaded Trump to fire someone who’d recently criticized AI companies.
It’s the rare time that MAGA world is in agreement with the Democratic Party, which has roundly condemned the firings of Hayden and Perlmutter, and also zeroed in on the Musk-Sacks faction as the instigator.
In a press release, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) characterized the hundred-plus-page report, the third installment of a series that the office has put out on copyright and artificial intelligence, as “refus[ing] to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.” Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who told The Verge in an emailed statement that the president had no power to fire either Hayden or Perlmutter, said, “This all looks like another way to pay back Elon Musk and the other AI billionaires who backed Trump’s campaign.”
However, the entire AI industry is built on an expansive interpretation of copyright law that’s currently being tested in the courts.
None of Trump’s purported appointees have a particularly relevant background for their new jobs — but they are certainly not DOGE people and, generally speaking, are not the kind of people that generative AI proponents would want in the office. And for now, this counts as a political win for the anti-tech populists, even if nothing further happens.
The speed of the firings and subsequent power struggle, however, have underscored the brewing constitutional crisis sparked by Trump’s frequent firing of independent agency officials confirmed by Congress. The Library of Congress firings, in particular, reach well past the theory of executive power claimed by the White House and into even murkier territory. It’s legally dubious whether the Librarian of Congress can be removed by the president, as the Library, a legislative branch agency that significantly predates the administrative state, does not fit neatly into the modern-day legal framework of federal agencies. (Of course, everything about the law is in upheaval even where agencies do fit the framework.) Regardless, the law clearly states that the Librarian of Congress — not the president — appoints the Register of Copyrights.
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