Government Funding Fight Foreshadows DOGE Disappointment For Elon Musk
HuffPost
Despite some late-night communication with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the billionaire budget guru isn’t on board with the GOP's spending plan.
WASHINGTON ― Elon Musk said Wednesday morning that Congress should not pass the government funding bill negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
The bill will likely pass this week nonetheless, but the opposition from Musk, Republicans’ newly anointed budget guru, could signal difficulty for the party’s vaunted “government efficiency” task force and its budget-cutting goals next year.
Johnson said he promised Musk and his fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy that things will be different once Republicans take control of the Senate and the White House. President-elect Donald Trump has said he would name Musk and Ramaswamy the directors of a non-government advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency, a reference to the “doge” internet meme and joke cryptocurrency that Musk has championed. (Ramaswamy is an investor in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.)
“Elon and Vivek and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this,” Johnson said Wednesday morning on Fox News, adding that he spoke to Ramaswamy around midnight. “Remember, guys, we still have just a razor-thin margin of Republicans. So any bill has to have Democrat votes.”
Republicans will have an even thinner margin in the House next year, but Johnson said he laid out an optimistic strategy, namely that a three-month funding bill would give Republicans a chance to put their stamp on spending in March, when Trump will be president and the DOGE enterprise is “working on all six cylinders.”
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