Government Funding Fight Foreshadows DOGE Disappointment For Elon Musk

WASHINGTON ― Elon Musk said Wednesday morning that Congress should not pass the government funding bill negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

The bill will likely pass this week nonetheless, but the opposition from Musk, Republicans’ newly anointed budget guru, could signal difficulty for the party’s vaunted “government efficiency” task force and its budget-cutting goals next year.

Johnson said he promised Musk and his fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy that things will be different once Republicans take control of the Senate and the White House. President-elect Donald Trump has said he would name Musk and Ramaswamy the directors of a non-government advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency, a reference to the “doge” internet meme and joke cryptocurrency that Musk has championed. (Ramaswamy is an investor in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.)

“Elon and Vivek and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this,” Johnson said Wednesday morning on Fox News, adding that he spoke to Ramaswamy around midnight. “Remember, guys, we still have just a razor-thin margin of Republicans. So any bill has to have Democrat votes.”

Republicans will have an even thinner margin in the House next year, but Johnson said he laid out an optimistic strategy, namely that a three-month funding bill would give Republicans a chance to put their stamp on spending in March, when Trump will be president and the DOGE enterprise is “working on all six cylinders.”

Despite their late-night communication, Musk wrote on his social media platform X on Wednesday that the bill “should not pass,” echoing the gripes of far-right House members who always vote against such funding bills.

“Welcome to the show,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) wrote in response to Musk’s post. “Remember all those members a couple weeks ago who were kissing your ass and talking tough about cutting spending? Now it’s time for you to watch how they vote.”

If the bill fails, as Musk said it should, the federal government would partially shut down on Friday at midnight. As of Wednesday morning, there is no alternative piece of legislation that could plausibly pass in Congress between now and then.

The impact of a brief weekend shutdown would be minimal. A prolonged shutdown sends nonessential federal workers home, disrupts application processing for things like passports and government benefits, reduces food safety inspections, shuts bathrooms at national parks and has a small negative effect on economic growth.

Musk currently has no official role in government, but he has Trump’s ear and has been embraced by Republicans in Congress. He previously boasted that he could easily identify $2 trillion worth of cuts from the federal government’s nearly $7 trillion annual budget ― a wildly unrealistic target without touching Medicare, Social Security or other parts of the budget, such as the military, that either Trump or Republicans have said should be off limits. Musk has not specified where he’d get the $2 trillion since first pitching the number in October.

But Musk and Ramaswamy have said they will explore new ways of firing federal workers and enacting spending cuts without Congress ― untested strategies that would likely trigger constitutional showdowns in federal court, since the Constitution puts the legislative branch in charge of spending and taxes. Others in Trump’s orbit have also said the president-elect would pursue mass firings and unilateral spending reductions.

In Congress, Republicans’ scant margin in the House will empower tiny groups of lawmakers to make demands for increased federal spending in their districts. But Johnson suggested that Musk and Ramaswamy understand the situation, and that they agree with him that enacting massive cuts will be easier next year, even if they don’t like the three-month stopgap bill.

“They said, ‘It’s not directed to you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ I said, ‘Guess what, fellas, I don’t either. We got to get this done, because here’s the key. By doing this, we are clearing the decks, and we are setting up for Trump to come in roaring back with the America First agenda,’” Johnson said on Fox News. “We will be able to finally do the things that we’ve been wanting to do for the last couple years.”