Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel of litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, and Michael McConnell, Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, join Jeffrey Rosen to debate whether the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has acted lawfully in firing federal workers and freezing federal spending.
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Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh, Gyuha Lee, and Samson Mostashari.
Participants
Kate Huddleston is the senior legal counsel of litigation at the Campaign Legal Center. Before joining CLC, Huddleston worked in impact litigation at the ACLU in Texas and Arizona, focusing on immigrants' rights issues, and at an environmental nonprofit. She clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Goodwin Liu of the Supreme Court of California. Huddleston is a graduate of Yale Law School and Princeton University.
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. His book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution, was published in 2020. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience, was published in 2023. McConnell has argued 16 cases in the United States Supreme Court, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Campaign Legal Center, Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (March 3, 2025)
- Michael McConnell and Laurence Tribe, “Is Musk’s DOGE Dodging the Law?,” Open to Debate (March 7, 2025)
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