Musk Triggers Political Earthquake in Congress

After weeks of being withdrawn from Washington politics, Elon Musk suddenly sent a shock wave through the Senate.

On Tuesday, CBS released a clip of Musk criticizing what President Donald Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill”—a budget reconciliation package that would ensure funding for major campaign promises, such as border security and the extension of Trump’s first-term 2017 tax cuts.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the [Department of Government Efficiency] team is doing,” he said. “I think a bill can be big, or it could be beautiful. But I don’t know if it could be both.”

That was music to the ears of fiscal hawks in the Senate, who are calling for major amendments to the bill that the House just passed.

Appearing on Fox on Wednesday morning, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., echoed Musk’s remarks and called for line-by-line cuts to spending in order to honor DOGE’s commitment to making spending cuts.

“You’ve got to go through every line. You’re not going to do enough if you just focus on the Green New Deal and you just focus on making sure Medicaid goes back to its original purpose,” said Scott. The Green New Deal is an ambitious and very expensive plan to wean the U.S. off fossil fuels and drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., one of the Senate’s most ardent advocates of spending cuts, also jumped into the fray.

“We have to take a business approach—DOGE has shown us how—go line-by-line through the $7,000 billion budget to expose the grotesque waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Johnson Wednesday in response to Musk.

Johnson is not the only senator calling for a line-by-line rooting out of the spending DOGE has targeted.

Others have been calling for a rescissions package in the past days. That’s a method of withdrawing spending with a simple majority in both houses of Congress.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, another fiscal hawk, said on X on Tuesday, “Raise your hand if you want Congress to codify the DOGE cuts.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called on the White House on Sunday to send a rescissions package to Congress to make DOGE’s cuts a reality.

“Congress can’t cut spending through DOGE without the president sending a formal ‘rescission’ bill. That’s the law. It only takes a simple majority to pass—but so far, no bill has been sent. In this case, Congress is waiting on the White House,” he wrote on X.

Those remarks are similar to what Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, who reluctantly voted for the budget reconciliation bill, told The Daily Signal three days before the bill passed the House.

“I haven’t heard anything about DOGE, and as far as I know, we’re not codifying DOGE findings as fast as we should,” he said.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., took to X on Wednesday afternoon, likely to address Musk’s comments.

“The House is eager and ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to Big Government that President Trump wants and the American people demand,” he wrote.

Johnson added that the House would act on those findings through a coming rescissions package and through the appropriations process.

His remarks were underneath a post from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, in which Miller argued that the reconciliation process is not the correct vehicle for acting on DOGE’s work.

“DOGE cuts are to discretionary spending (e.g., the federal bureaucracy). Under Senate budget rules, you cannot cut discretionary spending (only mandatory) in a reconciliation bill,” wrote Miller.

The Senate’s Byrd Rule makes it difficult for Congress to enact changes that are not primarily budgetary by nature. 

As the conservative Economic Policy Innovation Center explains, unspent discretionary funds could be rescinded “in theory,” but this “would have to involve the Appropriations Committees receiving spending instructions … which has not happened since fiscal year 1982, before the Senate’s Byrd Rule was instituted.”

One of the strange quirks of the process is that increases in discretionary spending have not been scored as mandatory spending in the past, since they do not involve the Appropriations committees.

To be sure, Musk did not explicitly call in the CBS clip for line-by-line elimination of wasteful spending that DOGE has discovered, but simply criticized what he sees as excessive deficits that undermine DOGE’s work.

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