How Much Will Co-President Musk Get Accomplished In Washington— And Who's Running His Companies?

How Independent Will Trump Allow Congress To Think It Is?

(Only) One Down...

I walked by a TV the other day and… what’s his name— that Ohio senator who was displaced by Elon Musk as Trump’s number two?— was giving a soundbite… something about how Pete Hegseth, or one of the other lunatic fringe nominees, must be confirmed by the Senate because of Trump’s massive, unprecedented victory. No one from the TV show corrected his lie and told him that Trump’s victory was one of the puniest in American history and that his coattails worked so poorly that House Republicans have fewer seats than they did last cycle, when they couldn’t get anything accomplished without help from the Democrats.

On Sunday, Manu Raju, Sarah Ferris and Lauren Fox reported that the slim Republican congressional majorities are already beginning to fray over the MAGA agenda, “battling internally over the basic tenets of Trump’s first 100-day agenda— including which priorities should come first— in a preview of the landmines looming over the GOP’s ambitious agenda despite controlling all of Washington… where one Republican [House] defection could scuttle the entire agenda. The GOP will operate with one of the smallest congressional majorities in history while contending with major deadlines like averting a government shutdown as early as March and a potentially catastrophic debt default next year.”

[M]any senators argue that jumpstarting Trump’s term with a border bill— packed with widely popular GOP ideas— is a better move politically than risking a dragged-out tax battle.

“On tax, we always knew it was going to be very complicated. We want to do it right,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican up for reelection in 2026. “I have no objections to doing that secondary as long as we are working on it at the same time. It is going to take longer to get it done, but we want to do it correctly.“

Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina who is also up for reelection in two years, added: “We won saying we want to solve the border so I think it’s good policy and good politics to say he wants to lead with it. When we do the tax reconciliation, it’s gonna be big and complex.”

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who used to serve in the House, said passing their agenda “will be complicated.”

“Jason Smith doesn’t think that’s possible to take more than one bite of the apple,” she said. “And he may be right in the House. He has a pretty good read on how the House rolls. The House and the Senate don’t roll the same.”

One of the most influential voices in the debate will be Speaker Mike Johnson, the soft-spoken GOP leader who will the narrowest House margin in history as the result of expected vacancies when some members leave to join the Trump administration.

In an interview with CNN, Johnson didn’t take a position on how to sequence the bills, arguing that “we all have the same priorities” and indicating the talks with Senate leaders and Trump’s team were still taking shape.

“Look, I can make a case for different sequences of how we do all these priorities, but my job here is to build consensus,” Johnson said. “So we’re working to do that in a bicameral fashion.”

Asked about the challenges of passing the bills with no margin for error, Johnson quipped: “It’s going to be very easy. We know how to work with a small majority.”

With the razor-thin majority, House Republicans may have an unusual amount of leverage in the typically Senate-driven process of crafting a filibuster-proof legislative package. (For President Joe Biden’s own version, party leaders were repeatedly forced to rewrite their bill thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin. For Trump, the trouble could come from the House chamber instead.)

“They have a narrower margin than even we do, and so we may have to defer to the House a little bit,” Lummis said of the House, where she served eight years.

“It’s really unusual,” the Wyoming Republican said. “It might take a new attitude adjustment over here.”

…[T]he Budget Committee has been focused on options to offset the cost of some of those provisions.

A source familiar with the discussions says the committee has begun to identify potential spending cuts to pay for the tax bill, including repealing Biden’s executive order on student loans; issuing work requirements for able-bodied, childless working age recipients of Medicaid; and repealing some of the green energy tax incentives from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. But, as with any new spending cut, ensuring Republicans are united could be a massive lift with such a narrow majority.

“My experience has been trying to convince people to cut it, it’s kind of like going to heaven,” GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said of spending cuts. “Everybody’s ready to go to heaven, but nobody’s willing to take the trip.”

But even the GOP’s push to pass a border-focused bill may not be easy.

Rep. Andrew Clyde, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who is a close Trump ally, told CNN that Republicans shouldn’t consider anything less than the House’s own hard-line border package, known as HR 2, even though such a plan could run afoul of the Senate’s budget rules.

“I think HR 2 would be the floor of what we need,” Clyde said. And he added that he wants to see at least some tax policy in the package: “I think we can probably do a little bit of the tax aspect of it,” specifically citing Trump’s pledge to end taxes on tips.

But even some veteran Senate Republicans warned that passing two reconciliation bills will be a tall order.

“I think it’s going to be difficult,” said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the incoming chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

And that may— should— prompt people to ask, as Benjamin Wallace-Wells did yesterday, What Will Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy Accomplish With DOGE? Members of Congress are desperate to stay on Musk’s good side. After all, he’s the biggest political campaign spender in history. But he “set targets of up to at least two trillion dollars in cuts, from a federal budget of roughly seven trillion— the size of which had grown during Trump’s first term, along with the deficit… Ever since Ronald Reagan, the dream of business-oriented Republicans has been that an outsider would storm into town to eliminate the rules and fire the rule-makers. Now, perhaps a little less efficiently, the dream is that two outsiders will do it. The idea is that Musk and Ramaswamy will work in concert with budget-cutters in the executive branch, and with the support of a congressional doge caucus that is already forming. Musk and Ramaswamy— both fervently attentive to social media and operating seemingly without staff—are directly accessible to like-minded plutocrats in a way that politicians usually are not, and they have been taking suggestions. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, the investor Marc Andreessen claimed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau— a federal watchdog agency— had been ‘debanking’ conservative entrepreneurs. ‘The only right answer: shut it down,’ Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter. ‘Delete CFPB,’ Musk agreed.”

MAGA Mike is excited about a “a conservative ‘zeal’ for cuts” and Jodey Arrington (R-TX), the House Budget Committee chair, “proposed a work requirement for recipients of Medicaid and other federal welfare programs… A senior Republican aide told Punchbowl News, ‘Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster.’”

Ramaswamy, for his part, had just smoothly announced at a CNBC summit of corporate executives that hundreds of billions of dollars could be cut from Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare— which together account for nearly half the federal budget— through “basic program-integrity measures.” But protecting the core social-welfare programs has been key to Trump’s rebranding as a different type of Republican, one devoted to the working class. This summer, he embraced labor unions (the Teamsters’ boss, Sean O’Brien, famously spoke at the Republican National Convention), pledged to impose stiff tariffs that he claimed would help protect manufacturing jobs, and inveighed against Big Tech’s ties to China. His running mate, J. D. Vance, praised him as a leader “who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.”

Yet the Administration now taking shape looks less likely to restrain capitalism than to supercharge it. Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is meant to protect investors from market manipulation and scams, is a cryptocurrency booster. Kevin Hassett, nominated to lead the National Economic Council, is a longtime Washington hand who advised the pro-business Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Musk ally, has been tapped for a free-floating role overseeing A.I. and crypto. For Treasury Secretary, Trump has chosen Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund manager and George Soros protégé, whose main task seems to be to try to reassure Wall Street.

Part of the dissonance of this transition period is that pundits are still mulling exactly how Trump made his historic gains among traditionally Democratic working-class voters, even as he hands the initiative for his economic program to Musk, a China-friendly industrialist, who spent some two hundred and fifty million dollars on Trump’s campaign, and who now stands to become even more powerful. The tech titans have supplied a futurist sheen to a Trumpist project that had only really been able to focus on the past. Yet there’s a familiar ring here: Republicans are back in power; deregulation and spending cuts to social programs meant to protect ordinary people are back in vogue. The Trump Republicans are beginning to seem less like a populist party— and this moment, perhaps, less like a populist time— than they had led their followers to believe.

On Meet the Press yesterday, Trump ruled out— for whatever that means when push comes to shove— cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “I won’t do it,” he said. At the same time, Russ Baker was delineating other ways Trump’s billionaires are going to become targets of hatred for most Americans in coming months. “We hear all the time,” he wrote, “about how bad the government is. The idea of course is that anything tax-funded is inherently inefficient, unresponsive, uncreative, sometimes paralyzing, and that the alternative is always better. Yet this old political slogan fails to acknowledge some structural realities. First, government entities are practically built for appeals; there are supervisors, plus, in many cases, other entities to go to if you don’t get any satisfaction initially. There’s also a small army of at least theoretically voter-accountable elected officials and their staffers, whose job is to hold accountable those federal bureaucracies on behalf of constituents. As problematic as the government can be, it is ultimately our friend when it comes to protecting us from the very behemoths we’re now being asked to liberate. Which brings me to one of the great neglected stories of our time: our growing victimhood at the hands of large corporations.”

Trump, whose Cabinet appointments lean heavily toward billionaires and near-billionaires, is almost certain to exacerbate this phenomenon in which we are all sharecroppers on the great corporate plantation, making the man in the big house richer while the rest of us struggle.

Few in positions of influence consider the full significance of this. A sense of powerlessness grips us, and— as we’ve seen in recent days— can even lead to deadly consequences.

We know of its many manifestations, from the sometimes fatal denial of medical care to the consequences of automation and outsourcing on workers.

Perhaps most conspicuously missing from the national conversation are the uncountable daily indignities every person endures at the hands of entities focused solely on new sales being rung up and ever-greater profits kept rolling in.

Of course, cheerleaders for the vaunted system of “private enterprise” have another defense at the ready: We consumers are free to take our business elsewhere.

Sure— unless we’re dealing with a monopoly, or a race to the bottom. In reality, with the growing gap between the very wealthiest and the rest of us has come an ever-accelerating cycle of consolidation and control. Even when we do have choices, we tend to go with the company with the largest footprint.

…Assigned to bear the brunt of our rage, increasingly, are foreign call-center personnel not equipped with much of anything besides scripted apologies. They have no personal agency, and frequently no effective means to get things quickly rectified. And even when things are “escalated,” people at the next level up also have limited agency.

I am often told that personnel at these companies literally do not even know where the corporate offices are, nor do they have any information on how to contact higher-ups to get satisfaction. On a few occasions recently, I was, believe it or not, told I could send a complaint letter by snail mail.

Many of these companies accidentally (or not) disconnect you, usually when transferring you— surely everyone has had this experience— and they rarely reconnect you when that happens. Which means you start all over again, waiting interminably, then explaining every detail to a new person, all over again. And then, of course, they, too, disconnect you.

…How important is it that we the public, when things go wrong, have the option to deal with actual human beings at large institutions who actually listen, who are trained to treat us courteously, and who have the resources to get our problems resolved in a prompt and fair manner? Anyone who has gone through an infuriatingly hellish encounter with the “customer service” department at a large company or government agency can supply their own answer.

The other day I was reading how Trump— presumably buoyed by members of his “billionaire Cabinet” who consider it a personal affront to be obliged to pay taxes— will likely gut the IRS and its ability to collect revenue for the government. It’s all part of a concerted effort to defund, and hence destroy, any agencies of government that actually serve the public, while keeping the parts that hand out lucrative government contracts to Trump-adjacent oligarchs like Elon Musk and his “government efficiency” partner Vivek Ramaswamy.

Speaking of the IRS, which the tycoons are so eager to neuter: My experience with that much-reviled entity over the years has been mixed and, while I know plenty of horror stories, on balance I’ve found it to be relatively well run, fairly responsive— and, most importantly, not so difficult to get an actual human being on the phone, which is always the first step to getting your problems resolved.