Vought suggests that independent agencies are unconstitutional. How about NASA?

It can be interesting to speculate about why Elon Musk has gone after USAID so viciously, but as Nancy Pelosi said about Trump, I suspect that "all roads lead to Putin." 

There is, however, another faction of the Trump administration that has laid out their motivations. That one is led by Project 25's author, Russ Vought - who currently serves as the Director of OMB. Here's what he told Tucker Carlson not long after the 2024 election (emphasis mine):

So my belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that you have to — the President has to move executively as fast, and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it.

Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such — SEC, or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup — but that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.

USAID is one of those "independent agencies" and Vought suggested that they are not constitutional. 

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Among those independent agencies is one that Musk is likely to protect at all costs - NASA. That's because, over the last 10 years, his SpaceX company has gotten $11.8 billion in contracts from the agency. All of that is despite the fact that SpaceX relies on undocumented immigrants and has a horrific record when it comes to worker safety. 

I doubt these conflicting views will ever come head-to-head. Vought is likely to find some way to carve out NASA from his campaign against independent agencies. The fact is that these guys don't feel an iota of shame when it comes to hypocrisy. But I still think it's worth noting.