On the eve of Donald Trump’s big speech to a joint session of Congress, the name on everyone’s lips in Washington, D.C., isn’t Donald Trump’s, but the man so often described as co-president, Elon Musk. His firing and canceling rampage across the federal government at the helm of his strange and law-disdaining DOGE has both preempted and complicated Trump’s agenda to an extent that is extraordinary in part because it was so unexpected (the whole scheme was apparently thought up well after Election Day) and remains unprecedented.
There’s a chance the absolute and very intentional chaos of DOGE will soon give way to something slightly more orderly as Trump’s appointees get settled in and take over the task of demolishing their own agencies. But that’s as unclear as the fate of the vast litigation DOGE has generated by treating the U.S. government like a privately owned tech company being stripped down to the studs. In the meantime, Musk has become the central figure in the congressional drama that could very well lead to a government shutdown in less than two weeks.
The government is currently being funded by a stopgap bill enacted in December, which Musk very nearly blew up at the time with a tweetstorm demanding deeper cuts than congressional Republicans were in a position to obtain. It expires on March 14. First Trump and then Republican leaders Mike Johnson and John Thune agreed that rather than adding to the instability in Washington with an early government shutdown, they’d just back another stopgap (know as a “clean continuing resolution” or “clean CR”) until the end of the fiscal year in September. It was presumed that Democrats — who absolutely have the power to block any CR with a Senate filibuster or by denying Johnson House votes that his fractious right wing might refuse to supply — would go along out of relief that Republicans weren’t demanding big new spending cuts.
But Musk has screwed up this deal. Initially Johnson talked about including existing DOGE cuts in a not-so-clean CR, recognizing that the fiscal hawks of the House Freedom Caucus were a Musk fan club thrilled by the chainsaw he was wielding across federal agencies. But now Johnson has backed off that plan and gone “clean” with his CR plans. So now it’s Democrats who have a big decision to make. Do they continue to insist that any deal on current spending include putting a leash on DOGE? Or do they take the deal on offer because they fear being blamed for a government shutdown and hope that either Trump gets sick of Musk upstaging him or the courts rein him in?
So as the blame game over a potential shutdown intensifies, privately Democrats and Republicans would probably agree it’s Musk who is the chief obstacle to a rare bipartisan deal in 2025. And as the leering cartoon-villain face of the Trump administration, he is also a threat to Trump’s standing in public opinion, as one Republican consultant admitted to Politico:
“The bigger risk is people being like, ‘[Elon’s] a fucking asshole. Can you at least have some compassion about what these people are going through? Can you at least treat them with respect? They have mouths to feed, roofs to keep over their heads,’” the consultant added. “Yeah, it has to happen. But why does an extremely pale lion have to play with his food here?”
The answer to that question may be that no one, not even Trump, can completely control Musk, and his freedom to be a jerk is considerably enhanced by his superstar status among the noisiest elements of Trump’s MAGA base, where cruelty in dealing with “the enemy” is valued above all. And there’s another problem for Musk’s ostensible boss just ahead: Even if Democrats surrender and agree to the “clean CR” Republicans want, is there any guarantee that Musk won’t again rile up a vast troll army on X to defeat it unless it includes more destructive spending cuts? Having enjoyed himself so conspicuously in trying to gut the hated federal government, why not shut it down entirely for a while? Any deal in Congress had better include Musk or he could very well make life difficult for his co-president.
