FTA:

In plain English, Donald Trump's "vision" is to kill the department, which Congress created in 1979 to administer federal education programs. An executive order has reportedly been in the works for a month, and legal or not, the department could be gone before you know it.

In fact, half the government could be gone, and the half that's left could be unrecognizable, before most people know it and anyone can do anything about it. It's all happening at whiplash speed, with little to no transparency. Even court challenges are no match for Trump's ideological army and Elon Musk's digital SWAT team.

Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson summed up the threat this week at a hearing on the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent agency created by Congress after the 2008 economic collapse to stop banks and other financial firms from scamming and cheating people, and hold them accountable if they do. She said she feared it would be "choked out of its very existence before I get to rule on the merits." In other words, Trump and Musk could outrun the rule of law, rendering it irrelevant.