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Welcome to a preview of coming attractions — your U.S. government (not) at work. The new administration is a month away from taking office, and it feels a lot like they’re already in power … except for the small problem that there may be no government to run as a Republican-led shutdown looms.
We’ve seen this movie before, but now we have a new lead actor. Move over Donald Trump and make way for the Ambassador of Chaos, Elon Musk. It would be funny if it weren’t so troubling.
While almost every Steady these days could don the headline ‘You Can’t Make It Up,’ today’s raises the bar to new heights.
Now the machinations of the U.S. Congress tend to be a pretty dry subject, but bear with me. It’s worth your time.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has spent the past few weeks working with both House Republicans and Democrats to negotiate a spending bill to keep the federal government open and running.
According to Politico, Donald Trump was given the broad strokes of the deal over the weekend, and he reportedly had no objections.
Late Tuesday, Johnson announced a deal that would keep the government funded for three months.
Wednesday morning, a disgruntled Elon Musk began a tweet-a-thon in opposition to the spending bill. Musk, who has no official role yet, is unelected, and will not need Senate confirmation, decided he didn’t like the bill. He let everyone know it with more than 100 posts on his social media platform, X.
“SHUT IT DOWN,” Musk posted; followed by “Folks, American Democracy is in TROUBLE,” said unironically.
He falsely claimed that shutting down the government would hurt no one.
“Just close down the govt [SIC] until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days,” Musk wrote on X.
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who would be furloughed and therefore not paid until there’s a deal. For context, when the government shut down for three weeks in 2018-19, the Congressional Budget Office said it cost the U.S. economy $3 billion. That estimate does not include lost productivity. But what’s a billion or three to someone worth 440?
Musk also threatened political retribution, saying he will financially back any primary opponent of Republicans in Congress who supported the original deal.
His beef with the bill is too much pork, which is the appropriation of funds for pet projects of individual House and Senate members. Pork is included in spending bills to appease members and guarantee their vote. It is how budgets are made and have been made since the dawn of American democracy.
The bill also includes $100 billion for disaster relief and billions for American farmers.
By the end of the day, Musk’s social media temper tantrum had worked. Trump, who as a reminder is not yet president, put out a statement noting his sudden displeasure with the bipartisan spending bill that he was just fine with until Musk. Long story slightly shorter, that bill is dead, as are Speaker Johnson’s chances of remaining Speaker Johnson. More on that in a minute.
Who exactly is calling the shots? It doesn’t sound like it’s the president-elect. It does sound like it is the richest man in the world, who paid an enormous amount of money to ride in Donald Trump’s sidecar.
“The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure, about this budget deal, all of a sudden Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal,” Democratic Congressman Daniel Goldman said on MSNBC.
Senator Bernie Sanders asked on X, “Are Republicans working for the American people or taking orders from ‘President Musk’?”
This morning Trump called, yes called, NBC to do damage control. During the phone interview he said he had spoken with Musk before the X owner went on his rant and that their views are “very much on track.”
So, now what? Late today, Speaker Johnson says he has a new deal, one that apparently makes Musk and Trump happy, but perhaps few others. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says it’s an unserious proposal and would be dead on arrival. The new bill is a pared-down version of the original with a debt ceiling increase.
Without boring you to the point that you scroll to the end of this piece, let me quickly explain. The debt ceiling is a limit on how much Congress can borrow to pay its bills. If the ceiling isn’t raised and the government can’t pay, it will be in default. If that happens, there will be actual hell to pay. The consequences for the U.S. economy could be catastrophic.
The Council of Economic Advisers said that if the government defaults on its obligations, “the economy would quickly shift into reverse, with the depth of the losses a function of how long the breach lasted.”
And now a twist no one expected. After Musk’s muscle flex over the continuing resolution, Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee have floated the idea of Musk replacing Johnson as speaker of the House. Yup, you read that right. The Constitution does not require a speaker to be a sitting member of the House of Representatives, though every speaker has been.
Several months ago, The Washington Post reported that Musk, who is originally from South Africa, was actually in the U.S. illegally for a time after dropping out of Stanford to start a business. He later became a citizen. Who would have thought that someone who has railed against undocumented immigrants was perhaps one himself, and now could be speaker of the House … the world’s richest person, and answerable to absolutely no one?
These are serious matters for the future of our country. Strange and perilous times, my friends.
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Stay Steady,
Dan
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