TPM reports:

The Trump White House has taken its attempt to seize direct control over the entire executive branch to a new level and laid out a startling legal rationale for the move in a previously unreported email obtained by TPM. If successful, Trump would be making a dramatic end run around the Senate’s advice and consent power for certain appointed positions.

Trump’s wide-ranging effort to bring independent agencies firmly under his control provoked a dramatic confrontation this week at the DC office of the U.S African Development Foundation. The White House Presidential Personnel Office and elements of Elon Musk’s DOGE team moved to oust the board of USADF and purported to install a new acting chairman of the board, a step that legal experts tell TPM is unlawful.

The full extent of the confrontation at USADF became public when the president of the independent agency filed a lawsuit Thursday trying to block the White House’s assault on its independence. The lawsuit refers to a Feb. 28 missive to USADF management from the White House Presidential Personnel Office claiming to appoint Pete Marocco – a Trump official known for helping strangle USAID from within – as “acting chair” of USADF’s board.

TPM has obtained the email in question, which contains the broadest assertion of presidential power over independent agencies yet made by the second Trump administration. In it, Trent Morse, deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of presidential personnel at the White House, stakes out a legal position that would undercut the Senate’s power to confirm new officers at agencies like USADF, experts say. Trump, Morse asserted, would have the “inherent authority under Article II” to appoint acting officials without going through the Senate’s process of advice and consent.

Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor at Stanford Law School, called the argument “so much more of an executive power claim than a lot of what they’ve done.” [Continue reading…]