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The House managed to hammer out a last-minute spending deal on Tuesday, but Speaker Mike Johnson’s rollout of the stopgap measure to avert a government shutdown faces a new obstacle: billionaire Elon Musk, who is now a major power broker within the Republican Party.
The narrow GOP majority faced significant hurdles in putting the spending bill together ahead of Friday’s deadline. If Johnson and his party fail to pass the bill, it could lead to a partial government shutdown.
But some members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus have complained about the bill’s spending priorities and are not backing it. As a result, Johnson had to seek help from Democrats to secure passage and was forced to make some concessions to the party.
Enter Musk to announce he doesn’t like the bill.
“This bill should not pass,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, the platform he owns (and has transformed into a racist haven). Musk also wrote a post complaining about “pork” in the bill.
Appearing on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning to sell the network’s conservative audience on why the bill must be passed, Johnson was asked to respond to Musk’s post.
“I was communicating with Elon last night. Elon and Vivek [Ramaswamy] and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this,” Johnson explained. Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, and the pair of billionaires have pledged to cut $2 trillion in spending despite the fact that it’s not an official department and they have no authority.
The speaker went on to say he was on the phone until “almost midnight” explaining what he had done and why.
Johnson said passage of the current bill is necessary as part of “clearing the decks” for the upcoming Trump presidency and the “America First agenda.”
Musk, who spent over $250 million to elect Trump and has vowed to bankroll campaigns against Republicans who don’t vote in lockstep with the MAGA agenda, does not appear to have been satisfied. Following Johnson’s Fox News appearance, he continued to make posts complaining about the bill’s contents.
Johnson’s attempts to mollify Musk not only give off the appearance of subservience to the richest man in the world, but also raise questions about how much power Trump truly has. After all, it is Trump who over the years has shaped and molded Republican Party policy via his social media posts.
Previous reports have indicated that sources close to Trump are already upset at the level of influence Musk wields, with some describing him as a “co-president.” If Musk is now dictating the House agenda on his own, is he now the shadow speaker as well?
