House Speaker Elon Musk
A sneak preview of the next four years.
Good morning! It’s Thursday, December 19, 2024. Inauguration Day is 32 days away.
🤯 Is the government about to shut down? Maybe! And there’s a lot the backstory can tell us about what to expect in Trump’s next term and about the broader problems facing Congress. Get ready, we’ve got a lot to cover…
A question: What does $277 million buy you in Donald Trump’s second term?
The answer: Veto power over the federal budget.
The transition of power hasn’t even happened yet, and Washington is already deep in the weeds of the first legislative battle of Trump 2.0.
The playing field is familiar: a fight over government funding, which — under the terms of a stopgap measure passed in September — is set to expire at 11:59 p.m. on Friday. If funding isn’t extended by then, the government will enter a shutdown.
A little before 7 p.m. on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released a bill (known in Washington as a “continuing resolution,” or a “CR”) to kick the can down the road some more, keeping the government funded through March 14.
In theory, that should only take a sentence: strike “December 20, 2024” from the September bill, and replace it with “March 14, 2025.”
But Johnson’s CR was much longer than a sentence. It was 1,547 pages.
In addition to the three-month funding patch, the measure also included $110 billion in disaster relief funding; $10 billion in aid for farmers; a slew of health care provisions; the first congressional pay raise in 15 years; new restrictions on U.S. investments in China; a bill to criminalize revenge porn; a deal to potentially bring the Washington Commanders back to the capital city; provisions targeting hidden fees for hotels and events; the Second Chance Reauthorization Act; the Youth Poisoning Protection Act; the American Music Tourism Act; the Rural Broadband Protection Act, and, well, a whole lot else.
Within a few hours, the package was on life support.
Why? Elon Musk woke up at 4 a.m. and started posting about it. And posting some more. In total, throughout Wednesday, the world’s richest man sent more than 100 missives on X — the social media platform he owns — trashing the behemoth bill and calling on Republican lawmakers to vote against it.
“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote.
For hours, President-elect Donald Trump remained quiet about the package, leaving Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (the co-chairs of his government efficiency initiative) to whip up a pressure campaign against Johnson (his handpicked speaker of the House).
“My phone was ringing off the hook,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) told the Associated Press. “The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk.”
By mid-day Wednesday, Musk had succeeded not only in lining up opposition from members of the House Freedom Caucus (who reliably vote against CRs), but also rank-and-file lawmakers who are typically aligned with their party leadership.
“How on earth did a 3 month Continuing Resolution grow into this Cramnibus,” one such member, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), asked on X. “It’s a nightmare bill,” Musk replied approvingly.
Eventually, Trump’s silence broke — but he still opted to speak only through his efficiency czar, his vice president, and a Fox host.
At 3:48 p.m. on Wednesday, a co-anchor of “Fox & Friends” announced that he had spoken with Trump, and that the president-elect was against the CR.
Ten minutes later, Musk declared victory, announcing the measure’s defeat before the president-elect or House leadership had commented. “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed!” Musk wrote, adding: “VOX POPULI VOX DEI,” a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
It was another half-hour before Vice President-elect JD Vance released a joint statement from him and Trump, calling for a “temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS” attached — but, oddly, demanding that an increase in the debt ceiling be added, something that had not previously been part of the spending negotiations. (The U.S. is expected to hit its borrowing limit in summer 2025.)
The statement went out from Vance’s X account, not Trump’s. “🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸,” Musk responded.
Now, with a potential shutdown looming, Speaker Johnson is left to pick up the pieces.
After all, remember how we got here in the first place. Musk is now rallying Republicans in calling for a “clean CR” — a continuing resolution without any added policy measures — but the reality is, right-wing lawmakers make a habit of voting against nearly all CRs (clean or not) when they come up for a vote, as a way to protest government spending.
Because of that, Johnson (like several Republican House speakers before him) always ends up needing Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown. And because of that, funding packages often end up including Democratic policy priorities, as a concession to win their votes.
This is the bed conservatives have made for themselves. But — egged on by Musk — they’re now refusing to sleep in it, and putting pressure on Johnson to find a new solution.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has suggested that Democrats won’t support a clean CR (“You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow”), which means Johnson will likely have to try his luck getting a clean stopgap past his own narrow majority (which would then need to be approved by the Democratic-led Senate).
Oh, and he also needs to find out if Trump is serious about raising the debt ceiling. And he needs to mollify Republicans who want the disaster relief funding kept in the package. (Not all the add-ons were there solely because of Democrats!) “It’s a fascinating mess,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) acknowledged to reporters.
Musk, for his part, has seemed to endorse a shutdown, something that bipartisan deals (like the CR unveiled on Tuesday) have managed to prevent from happening since, well, 2019... the last time Trump was president.
(Before this, Biden was on track to be only the second president since shutdowns were invented to avoid having one on his watch. Speaking of, where is Biden in all this, you ask? He’s played effectively no role in the funding debate, ceding the stage completely to Trump and Musk. It wasn’t until 7:24 p.m. on Wednesday that the White House weighed in at all, with a statement from press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre endorsing the original CR, which was already long-dead by then.)
But back to Johnson. This whole process has lost the Louisianan a lot of goodwill among his members, which is notable since he’ll need their support on January 3 to be re-elected speaker, which — like passage of the CR — seemed like a sure bet before Musk got involved this week.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) indicated Wednesday that he will vote against Johnson in January over his handling of the CR; at least nine other House Republicans told reporters they were undecided. Johnson will likely only be able to afford two defections. (Here’s your nightmare fuel for the day: if the speaker’s election takes more than three days — as it did last year — it’s unclear whether Congress would be able to hold the mandated January 6 session to certify the presidential election.)
This government funding episode is a perfect preview of what Washington will be like in Trump’s second term.
Sure, Republicans will control the House, Senate, and White House come January — but the same fundamental governing dynamics will hold true, paving the way for ample chaos and frustration when Trump runs into some of these same veto points.
In the Senate, the 60-vote filibuster will stand in the way of most bills that lack Democratic support. In the House, Johnson’s razor-thin majority is about to shrink even smaller, meaning party-line pieces of legislation will require sign-off from nearly every member of a historically hard-to-unify conference.
Whether or not Johnson remains speaker, after Trump cut his knees out from under him on Wednesday, it’s clear that the Louisianan will not be much of a power center.
The frenzy was also a reminder that Trump himself cares little about policy: not only did he barely involve himself in the CR furor, but his statement (with Vance) undercut its own message on the debt ceiling, seeming to suggest that he was opposed to an increase in 2025, but fine with one now — making plain that he is agonistic on the core policy question of whether or not the limit is ultimately raised. He just cares about the politics of whether it happens on his watch.
With Trump removed from the finer details — and Johnson hemorrhaging support — it is Musk who will wield enormous power over legislation, at least in the areas where he chooses to get involved.
Between his ownership of X and his new role as the Republican Party’s biggest donor, Musk has nearly unmatched influence over both the GOP’s communications and its finances. The only man who can compete with him, of course, is Trump, his “first buddy” (at least for now: we all know how Trump responds when he feels his allies are taking up too much of the spotlight).
For most of Wednesday, Musk — from afar — was the center of Washington, with lawmakers tweeting at him to announce their CR opposition (“@elonmusk is right…”) and prodding him to promote their other legislative asks (“Passing KOSA will cost taxpayers nothing, but will save countless children. @elonmusk,” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn posted about her child online safety bill.)
When Johnson unveiled the CR, he even announced that the House would also consider a bill called the “Disaster Offset and Government Efficiency Act” — the “DOGE Act,” a nod to Musk’s favorite memecoin and his efficiency initiative. If it was an attempt to win the billionaire’s support for the CR, it was not effective.
In Trump 1.0, most of D.C. was glued to the whims of @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter feed for signs of where the political conversation would go next. In Trump 2.0, it seems like that might be replaced by watching @elonmusk (and, to a lesser extent, @JDVance) on X.
“This is the way it’s going to be next year,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was heard saying at the Capitol on Wednesday. Make that the next four years, Mr. Leader.
The rise and fall of the year-end CR doesn’t only tell us what to expect in Trump’s next term. There are also broader takeaways here about what ails Congress as an institution.
In Musk’s flurry of posts on Wednesday, there were several claims that were untrue, about Ukraine aid, about bioweapons, about Washington’s possible NFL stadium, and more.
But there was also a broader point that was well-taken: Should lawmakers really be ramming through 1,500 pages of new law in the last 48 hours of the legislative year?
There is a perfectly explicable political calculus at play here — Johnson needed Democratic votes; the Democrats had certain demands; a deadline helps everything go down — but it is also representative of just how broken the legislative process has become.
In theory, the government is funded by 12 appropriations bills that Congress is supposed to pass by October 1 each year. In reality, lawmakers haven’t managed to do that since 1997. Right now, it’s mid-December, and not a single appropriations bill has been signed into law — which is why lawmakers are haggling over their second continuing resolution of the fiscal year. If a new stopgap bill takes us into March, then the U.S. will have spent almost half of Fiscal Year 2025 governed by CR.
Then there’s the matter of all the extra bills rammed into the CR at the last minute. Why are those only being passed now, in the dead of night?
Because the system of getting bills onto the floor is so sclerotic — in the Senate, it takes days to do anything that isn’t unanimous; in the House, the speaker maintains a stranglehold on the legislative calendar — the best hope for making a bill into a law becomes sticking it onto an unwieldy must-pass measure. Not exactly the stuff of “Schoolhouse Rock.”
Musk is right: each of the individual bills in the 1,500-page CR — covering important areas like health care, commerce, agriculture, and more — deserve individual hearings and votes, not to be ingloriously stuffed into one big package that’s practically designed not to be read.
But he’s wrong in thinking that costly government shutdowns or fact-free pressure campaigns — instead of honest-to-God structural reforms — would do anything to fix that. Come January 20, for better or for worse, Musk seems poised to wield a lot of power over American governance. It will be up to him whether he wants to use it to advance an unserious political project, or one that could actually address some of the flaws he’s diagnosing.
More news to know
The Wall Street Journal penetrates the Biden bubble (gift link):
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, [Biden’s advisers] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge against the federal law that could lead to the app being banned in the U.S.
The Federal Reserve lowered its key interest rate by a quarter-point, setting a cautious tone for 2025.
The House Ethics Committee voted to release the Matt Gaetz ethics report.
Republican senators want to see the FBI’s background check on Pete Hegseth. (Such reports are usually only reviewed by the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top two members.)
Federal officials are worried about the Trump transition team’s use of a private email server.
President Biden announced an aggressive new climate goal this morning. “The target is not binding and will almost certainly be disregarded by President-elect Donald J. Trump,” the New York Times points out.
The Montana Supreme Court upheld a first-of-its-kind lower court decision finding that youth plaintiffs have a constitutional right to a clean environment.
The day ahead
President Biden will return to Washington, D.C., from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he spent the previous two days marking the anniversary of his first wife’s death.
Vice President Harris will depart Washington, D.C., for her home in Los Angeles, where she will spend the weekend.
The Senate has no votes scheduled.
The House, well, here’s the lower chamber’s schedule per House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): TBD.
The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled this week.
Before I go…
Here’s something fun: I have a guest piece up at
about Martha Hughes Cannon, the first female state senator in U.S. history.Cannon, elected in Utah in 1896, had a fascinating story: a suffragist, a pioneering female doctor, and one of six wives of the polygamous Mormon leader Angus Canon — who, by the way, she beat in her first state Senate race. That’s right: she beat her husband.
Last week, Cannon was honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol. Read all about her here:
Thank you for this great analysis of the CR bill. I swear, there are so many spinning plates in the air, it’s great to have your explanation.
Also, I think as soon as Trump becomes President again, he’s going to get really tired of Musk taking all of the attention away from him. That should be an interesting time. It makes me wonder if Musk has more on Trump than billions of dollars in donations.
Really enjoyed your article on Martha Hughes Cannon, Gabe! Thanks for linking it here!