If the statutory debt ceiling is a potential economic crisis looking to leap off paper legislation, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are a potential crisis blundering through the physical (and virtual) halls of government.
Elon Musk’s recent spate of illegal impoundments and firings can be seen as an attempt to mimic what a debt ceiling crisis would look like. Instead of spending being bound by a legal bar against issuing new debt, spending is currently being bound by the whims of a billionaire who bullied his way into accessing the Treasury accounts that distribute spending where it is legally obligated to go and shutting it down.
At this point, the illegal impoundments have not added up to a scale that would be comparable to a debt ceiling scenario, but, again, this is entirely because the Musk team has so far decided to not impound that much spending. If they decide that it would be fun to impound more and cause a crisis, what’s to stop them?
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