House Speaker Mike Johnson was already facing opposition from the conservative Freedom Caucus in his latest effort to pass a spending bill. But he’s overcome that in the past; he even got Marjorie Taylor Greene to blink earlier this year, after she spent more than a month threatening to oust him. So, even with the right-wing backlash, he might’ve managed to navigate the continuing resolution through the chamber and avoid a shutdown.
But then came the real pressure.
Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the two unelected billionaires Donald Trump put in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, said the legislation constituted an “early test” of Republicans’ commitment to a “more streamlined federal government.” And any member who fails, posted Elon Musk, DOGE’s other leader, “deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”
“Kill the bill,” Musk wrote, whipping Republicans against the stopgap with a litany of false claims, threats, and assurances that a shutdown wouldn’t be that bad.
By the end of his all-day posting marathon, Musk—perhaps Trump’s most powerful ally, and a kind of shadow president himself—was claiming victory, declaring the “horrible” legislation dead. “The voice of the people has triumphed,” he wrote, reposting a number of GOP lawmakers’ promises not to vote for the CR—trophies, in a sense, commemorating the elected officials he was able to cow into submission. DOGE was purported to be an outside advisory panel to do away with bureaucratic bloat; in practice, it seems, it will be an enforcement arm of MAGA orthodoxy.
Johnson on Wednesday afternoon was suddenly reported to be exploring a “plan B” to keep the government open into the new year, when Trump and the Republicans will have unified control of Washington. By Thursday, with the shutdown looming, his path forward still seemed uncertain.
Trump—who weighed in to oppose the CR late in the day Wednesday, only after the bill seemed to be on the verge of collapse—has used his political muscle to get his party in line before, of course. But in Musk—who commands not only a massive war chest as the world’s richest man, but untold influence as the owner of X—Trump seems to have found a practical steamroller. “Just like that, Republican Unelected Co-President Elon Musk has killed the bill to keep the government from shutting down on Friday,” as Democratic Representative Max Frost put it Wednesday. “All he had to do was make a few social media posts.”
“Trump said he’d empower working people,” added Frost. “All he’s done is empower the ultra wealthy.”
Indeed, Trump’s official administration is set to be one of the wealthiest in American history—and that doesn’t count the extragovermental figures, like Musk, whom he’s commissioning with quasi-executive powers. The CR was a test, as Ramaswamy put it, but not specifically of Republicans’ belief in small government; it was a test of the unaccredited power of DOGE and Trump’s plutocratic shadow administration. And from the looks of it, this unofficial government had little trouble running roughshod over actual Republican elected officials. It may have even gotten out ahead of Trump himself.
Will Trump abide that, or the references to “President Musk,” in the long term? Will Capitol Hill Republicans? It remains to be seen. But at the very least, the litmus tests that did in Kevin McCarthy and previously threatened Johnson’s gavel may come to seem rather quaint.
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