Washington is in a tizzy over Donald Trump‘s sweeping assertions of executive power, often at the behest of Elon Musk, an influential private citizen who decidedly lacks public office. At Musk’s suggestion, Trump is purporting to shutter whole agencies, cut appropriated funding, and decimate the civil service.

One might ask, “How could Congress allow a private citizen to exercise such legislative authority?” The truth is that Congress has a history of delegating its legislative power to private entities, usually with enthusiastic support from progressives. With those chickens coming home to roost at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, there should be bipartisan support for the Supreme Court taking a stand to end private delegation of legislative power. That’s the issue at stake in a case the Court heard on Wednesday: FCC v. Consumers’ Research.

The Consumers’ Research case involves the Universal Service Fund (USF). Established in 1996, the USF seeks to expand telephone access at reasonable prices. To do this, Congress gave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) carte blanche to raise revenue for the USF. That is, not only did Congress delegate its taxing power to an executive agency, the FCC—it didn’t even tell the FCC how much to raise, giving it unprecedented taxing authority to achieve the goals of the USF, bound by “principles” instead of law.

As Consumers’ Research notes in its brief, “But wait, it gets worse.” That delegated taxing power has itself been further delegated by the FCC to a private organization—the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC)—which determines how much to raise and then dictates its decision to telecommunications companies, all without any review by the government. Predictably, the rate assessed has gone from 4 percent in 1998 to nearly 37 percent, a nearly tenfold increase to a line-item on Americans’ phone bills. If you don’t like it, well, don’t bother writing to your representatives—they aren’t involved in this tax.

So not only has Congress left it up to the FCC to determine how much revenue to raise—arguably the core of legislative power—but it has authorized the FCC to further delegate that question to a private party, which, in turn, passes on the costs to consumers. No matter how laudable the goal of improved telephone access may be, this is quite simply not how our system of government works. No one voted for the USAC—or even the FCC—and yet it’s competent to, effectively, tax consumers to fund legislative priorities.

The Constitution places “all legislative powers” in the hands of Congress. Not some, not most, but all. The precise limits of how much Congress may delegate this power to the executive are unclear—indeed, the Supreme Court in last term’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo seemed to give wide latitude for Congress to make explicit, flexible delegations to the executive. But those limits surely do not expand so far as to include private taxation by congressional double delegation.

When this case was moving through the lower courts, the fight against delegation was primarily conservatives’ cause. After all, legal conservatives have long supported a formalistic view of the separation of powers. They view the strict separation of powers as a bulwark of liberty because it impedes the possibility of rapid policy change, while at the same time grounding policy in the politically accountable person of the president and members of Congress.

Progressives, on the other hand, have long favored a functionalistic approach to governance. That view goes back to Woodrow Wilson, who explained in “The Study of Administration” that “the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency.” What matters to progressive government is getting things done, not the arcane legal roadblocks set up by long-dead English colonists.

Now, Trump and Musk are getting things done, using congressional delegations of authority where possible and echoing Wilson’s functionalist claims to “government efficiency” where not. Before progressives start to ape legal formalists—calling for stricter separation of powers in response to Trump’s initiatives—perhaps they should look in the mirror to see how we got here. If the rigid separation of powers is good for the Trumpian goose, it should also apply to the USF gander.

Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a partner at Torridon Law PLLC. He previously served as chief counsel for constitutional law to the Senate Judiciary Committee and chief counsel to its Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.