Last month Elon Musk established a new standard for corruption—and most of media—and, therefore, most of us citizens—missed it.
As a government shutdown deadline of Friday, December 20, approached the media was all abuzz over what would happen if Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution (CR) by midnight. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) had negotiated a bipartisan Continuing Resolution (H.R. 10545) with Democrats in the House, and the bill was set to come to the House floor for a vote. (On account of controversy among House Republicans Johnson knew he would need votes from Democrats to pass the CR.)
On Wednesday, two days before the approaching deadline, Elon Musk, the oligarch who had spent 277 million dollars to get Trump elected (a tiny fraction of his wealth, but an amount nearly unimaginable to the rest of us), sent out a storm of tweets on X, his solely-owned social media platform, formerly Twitter, declaring, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” H.R. 10545 never made it to a vote, thanks to cowering Republican congresspeople fearful of a primary challenger lavishly funded by Elon. (Isn’t this a form of extortion?)
Hours later the President-Elect (NOT President—at least not until January 20th) followed on Elon’s tweet storm with a demand to Congress to extend the debt limit as part of the CR.
Johnson quickly assembled and put up an alternative bill that included a debt limit extension, H.R. 10515—and that went down in flames. As the clock ticked down toward Friday at midnight, a new stopgap funding plan, a modified version of H.R. 10515 but without the debt limit extension (H.R. 10545) passed the House and the Senate and soon thereafter was signed by President Biden. Phew! Crisis averted! Not only that, but both Musk and Trump were delivered black eyes on their first outing, right? Musk didn’t get his DOGE shutdown and Trump looked like he was playing second fiddle to the oligarch. In addition, Trump and his Republicans will have to deal with the debt limit themselves in order to pass more tax cuts for the rich.
What most of us didn’t realize (including me)—and the media mostly failed to point out—is that Continuing Resolutions to keep the government funded may not only extend the spending at the level specified in the last Appropriations bill, but typically also contain some budget modifications. These modifications often get lost in the crisis atmosphere. At the end of a “Congress,” the two year period between federal elections, there are always bills that a majority would vote for—if only leadership had found the time and motivation to put them on the floor for a vote during the main session. (The 2023-24 Congress [the 118th] technically ends on January 3, 2025, but functionally ended on December 20, 2024 when Congress people went home for the holidays.) Bills that don’t get a vote die at the end of a two year Congress and must be refiled and reconsidered in the next. Popular bills like the reauthorization of 190 million dollars for childhood cancer research that the Congress didn’t get around to in the regular two year session are often appended to a must-pass bill like the CR in order to simply “git-er done.” Members of a new Congress sworn in on January 3 might be very different from the last—so even popular bills in one Congress need to be wholly reconsidered in the next.
In the coverage over keeping the government funded, the media pretty much lost track of this detail: Thanks to the threats of an unelected oligarch with money to burn on his own behalf, the originally negotiated CR (H.R. 10545) over two days from Wednesday to Friday was slimmed down from 1,547 pages to the 116 pages of the CR that finally passed (H.R. 10545). Consider that. No matter how many staffers are involved, you don’t intelligently and thoughtfully remove 1,431 pages from a carefully negotiated bill in 48 hours. The devil is in the mostly ignored details.
Conservative media (and Musk himself) played Musk’s threat as the laudable first act of DOGE’s efforts to cut money from federal spending while they neglected what was removed from the negotiated bill, like carefully negotiated reforms reining in Pharmacy Benefit Managers—reforms championed for years even by Cathy McMorris Rodgers in her “newsletters”. (See the last half of this linked article for more detail on that and other carve-outs. No paywall.)
But, mostly lost in the media excitement over avoiding a shutdown was this gem:
Also stripped from the bill was a provision that would have limited US investments in China, particularly in the technology sector.
Democrats have slammed the removal of the measure, arguing that its absence would benefit Elon Musk, who helped derail the bipartisan package on Wednesday.
“Musk’s investments in China, and ties with its government, have only grown over the last few years – alongside his growing involvement in American politics,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote in a letter Friday to congressional leaders.
“It is no surprise, then, that ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law,” she wrote.
The measure would have “prevented wealthy investors from continuing to offshore production and US intellectual property into China,” she wrote.
Rep Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) has it right—and she’s no lightweight. “President” Musk, the richest man in the world, managed, with his tweeted threats, to further enrich himself. Musk is a lot of things, but, unlike Trump, Musk is no fact-less fool. Musk is on the Republican spending cut bandwagon for his own, and other oligarchs’, benefit. We are dangerously close if not already an oligarchy, a government like Russia’s and Hungary’s (think Victor Orban) rigged by the wealthy few.
Musk didn’t like the exposure of his strategy by Rep. DeLauro. Lashing out on social media he called for her expulsion from Congress. Check this article out for the details of Musk’s pseudo-masculine bluster.
The full text of Rep. Delauro’s letter to Congressional leadership highlighting Musk’s machinations is available here. It’s worth reading and sharing.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. There was a time when Musk’s clever self-dealing would have been a national scandal. But in this new era of Trump-enabled oligarchy and social media obsession the scandal gets lost in the details.