The View Hosts Lay Into Elon Musk Over Access to Government’s ‘Bank Account’: ‘What They’re Doing Is Actually Illegal!’
The View hosts slammed Elon Musk’s access to the federal government’s “bank account” as “illegal” and accused President Donald Trump for trying to “expand his power” by giving the billionaire a “special government employee” status that protects him.
From the show’s opening on Tuesday, accountability and transparency around the activities of Musk’s DOGE teams were top of the agenda as host Whoopi Goldberg asked: “Who are these people? And why do they have access to any of your business?”
“Are Americans going to be okay with Musk?” Goldberg asked as the studio audience jeered. “A guy nobody voted for having all this kind of power? You know the news outlet Wired found out six of the gentlemen on Elon Musk’s team are between the ages of 19 to 24 with little or no government experience and no one is in college.”
Co-host Sara Haines interjected: “What they’re doing is illegal.”
Blasting Musk for shuttering the USAID agency along with its Congress-approved aid programs, she continued: “Everyone knows that the separation of power allows for Congress… They have the power of the purse. This is money that was already allocated from taxpayer money and to stop it is actually… There was an act passed in 1974, I think it was the Impoundment Control Act because they feared [President Richard] Nixon was blocking programs where Congress had already approved funds because he didn’t like them.”
Haines added: “So, it’s beyond Elon Musk. Donald Trump doesn’t have the power to do what he’s doing right now but I wonder where the screaming is, because Donald Trump floods the zone. We talked about how the last couple weeks have felt like a year. It’s only been a couple weeks.”
As then hosts began to discuss Trump’s war on diversity and inclusion initiatives, co-host Sunny Hostin drew the conversation back to Musk’s “special” status: “I’ve given so much thought to it when we first started learning about Elon Musk being a special government employee, which means he has top security clearance, but he doesn’t have the obligations that a full federal employee has, so he doesn’t have to give the same amount of disclosures, he has less conflicts of interest and, it seems to me, that when I put my legal hat on, what Donald Trump is trying to do, he’s trying to expand the powers of the executive branch.”
She continued: “What he is trying to do is trying to figure out how he can expand his power, the power of the executive branch and have a little more power over Congress, and he certainly has kind of a bit of power over the judicial branch because the top of the judicial branch is the Supreme Court which he has packed with loyalists.”
Rounding to her conclusion, she added: “In my view, I think… he’s causing a constitutional crisis intentionally so that this goes to the Supreme Court and if the Supreme Court, ladies and gentlemen, say, ‘yeah, he can do this’ our constitution as we’ve known it…”
“Is in the toilet,” Goldberg finished.
Watch above via ABC.
