No. of Recommendations: 7
Think of it as the Office of the President doing the asking because that is where the authority comes from. You guys hate Trump just so damn much you can't grasp that the President has the authority to see everything in the custody of the Executive Branch. He can declassify the top most secrets, but somehow it is none of the Presidents business exactly where the $50B spent by USAID year after year actually goes.
Again, that's not the correct way to think about it. If the President walked over to USAID and asked to look at things, they would have to show him the things he asked to see. And probably would have. But Elon Musk's deputies are not the President.
The President can look at everything, but every governmental worker (save one) is not personally the President. The President wants and needs some people to be able to look at many things, but not everyone is intended to be given that authority. That's why the President has established rules about who is allowed to look at what things. The most prominent example is the classification system. If one of Elon Musk's deputies asks to see a document but doesn't have the security clearance to see it, the person who has the document is supposed to say no. It's not true that the "Office of the President" is doing the asking - instead, this specific person is doing the asking, and that specific person doesn't have all the privileges and permissions that the POTUS has.
Again, classification is perhaps the most widely known such system, but those types of rules abound in government. Not every person who is asking for something on behalf of the President gets access to everything under the existing rules. At any point the President himself (or certain designees under the rules) can change that. POTUS can declassify, or order a "No Unauthorized Personnel" sign removed, or whatever. But unless and until that happens, all the other people in the government are supposed to follow the rules about who does and who does not have access to various things.
So this person got fired because Musk's deputies weren't given access to the info - but were they supposed to be given access?
