You’d think the man that Donald Trump empowered to tear the federal bureaucracy limb from limb would have taken the trouble to familiarize himself with the procedures available for cutting federal spending in a more orthodox manner. But it seems Elon Musk did not know there was a way to cut current-year spending without unleashing kiddie coders to commandeer federal-agency data and boss around (or fire) personnel, as Axios reports after Musk’s March 5 meeting with congressional Republicans:
Elon Musk and Republican senators are eyeing a package to claw back tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending after meeting in a closed-door lunch on Wednesday. …
Musk has been leading the charge on spending cuts from the White House. Some lawmakers want to make his actions more permanent by making them law.
No decisions have been made, but there was some early, general support for the idea being pushed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) after the lunch. An infamous deficit hawk, Paul pitched Elon Musk on a massive rescission package during a lunch on Wednesday, he told reporters. Such a package would undo federal funding already approved by Congress.
The bill would also only require 51 votes to pass the Senate — no Democrats needed. Paul said specific numbers weren’t discussed, but he’d like to see $500 billion. …
Musk “was elated” at the idea, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters. “I think he didn’t realize it could be done at 51.”
What they were talking about is an arcane procedure, called rescissions, established by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 wherein the president can propose clawbacks of unspent current-year appropriations and Congress can approve them on a fast-track vote that cannot be filibustered. It’s a counterpart to the future-year cuts obtainable through budget-reconciliation bills, which the Republican-controlled Congress is slowly moving toward enacting later this year. Rescissions should be familiar to Team Trump, since the 45th president proposed a $15 billion package of such cuts in 2018; they passed the House but were rejected by the Senate, as it happens.
This time around, rescissions could be immense, as Rand Paul’s half-trillion-dollar suggestion indicates. But the real idea is to reassert some sort of congressional involvement in spending decisions currently being made in the executive branch by Musk’s DOGE, Russ Vought’s Office of Management and Budget, and in some cases by agency leaders following directions from Musk and Vought. Congressional authorization of current-year cuts might also help insulate them from judicial cancellation on grounds that Trump’s agents are usurping powers constitutionally assigned to the legislative branch, as CNN explains:
“What we got to do as Republicans is capture their work product, put it in a bill and vote on it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said, describing how Congress can play a bigger role in implementing DOGE cuts. “We need to capture this in the legislative process to make it real.”
If that’s as far as it goes, that might indeed “elate” Musk, since it means Congress rubber-stamping his work and reducing the amount of time his minions spend being deposed for lawsuits over the legality of DOGE’s raids on “the deep state.” Presumably, congressional Republicans might want some input into the previously chaotic DOGE processes and the chaos and fear they have engendered, not just with respect to federal employees and contractors but among the constituents who depend on the services they provide. But on the other hand, by pursuing rescissions Trump’s faithful congressional allies will own DOGE’s chainsaw approach to federal spending. An additional problem is the risk of losing a rescission vote, as happened to Republicans in 2018 when two GOP senators voted with Democrats to kill the action. Mike Johnson’s entire strategy for surviving 2025 without losing his gavel is to minimize the number of major House floor votes that stress-test his fragile majority. A big rescission package could produce another dangerous moment for House Republicans.
Presumably, Russ Vought and the White House will make the real decision about the advisability of a rescissions package. It’s possible that they are so very deeply invested in consolidating a vast expansion of executive power that they don’t actually want even a rubber-stamp from Congress. But there are some advantages this approach will give them: Once rescissions are proposed, affected spending items are frozen for 45 days until Congress acts upon them, buying time and preventing judicial interventions.
Going forward, shifting power from DOGE to agency leadership on the one hand and Congress on the other would free up Elon Musk for whatever task he chooses next. It’s sobering to realize that the whole immensely consequential DOGE project was apparently dreamed up by Musk after the November elections and probably took powerful Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania — very much including the president of the United States — by surprise. A lot may depend on whether the financial savior of Trump’s 2024 campaign keeps at his current self-appointed task or moves on to something equally destructive.
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