Investigative journalism and the rule of law

Muckraking's symbiosis with the constitutional order under Donald Trump.

Senators of the Senate Rackets Committee and committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy, by Marion S. Trikosko, Feb. 10, 1959. (Library of Congress)

Elon Musk’s underlings appear to be doing a lot of illegal and unconstitutional stuff in Donald Trump’s Washington. Investigative journalists are already helping stop some of it.

Early this morning, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) from accessing sensitive U.S. Treasury data and to destroy any copies.

Englemayer’s ruling came after 19 Democratic states filed suit alleging a variety of statutory and constitutional violations. Their complaint cited about 30 news stories in the footnotes, mostly from WIRED, Associated Press, Washington Post and the New York Times. And that’s just one of many lawsuits now unfolding after President Trump’s second blitzkrieg to dramatically expand executive authority under the American system of government.

Many journalists struggle with our place in the hostile, ultracompetitive 21st century information ecosystem. In societies built on lies, why would facts matter? This kind of self-doubt reached its apex during and immediately after the 2024 election, when it became clear the path to electoral victory ran through Joe Rogan more than the AP.

What’s happened since Trump’s second inauguration has been the revenge of the writers. (Campaigning is an oral tradition, where bullshitters rule; but governance, with all its constitutions and judges and legislatures, is the final citadel of the written word.) Independent journalist Marisa Kabas was the first to scoop Trump’s freeze on federal grants. Since then the legacy tech press, led by WIRED under editor Katie Drummond, has delivered exclusive after exclusive on Musk’s attempting Silicon Valley-style dismantling of the federal civil service.

These investigative reports have been a kind of civic WD-40, slicking the tracks for the sluggish Resistance 2.0 to slide into place, where the political minority will perform its usual checking function on the majority in the courts, the streets and the realm of public opinion. This is your Fourth Estate at work.

I don’t praise this journalistic effort to convey a sense of optimism necessarily. It seems clear Trump and Musk will transgress norms and laws as freely as they like until somebody stops them. Congress seems disinterested in protecting the Founders’ separation of powers; many of our civil leaders seem to have misplaced their backbones, if not their sense of purpose entirely; and the public, a minority of whom even voted for Trump, lacks a clear sense of its political ambitions beyond a contempt for incumbency. What happens if the judiciary’s restraining orders go ignored?

In times of uncertainty it’s the fearless who set the tone, and a lot more people will need to get brave about our social compact of rule by constitutional law. “When the republic is threatened, the word 'republican' changes its meaning,” as Léon Blum once said said. “It takes on its old historic and heroic significance.”