If government spending is a tree with thick branches and deep roots, Elon Musk hasn’t even managed to snap off a twig.
And as Musk is preparing to step back from his duties at DOGE — without even coming close to fulfilling his dream of cutting $1 trillion — some Republican lawmakers are already thinking about how to reinstate some of the programs he scrapped.
“That’s going to be an interesting debate,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas said Thursday when asked if lawmakers would codify Musk’s work to dismantle America’s foreign aid programs.
“If we get off the field completely and there’s a void, then our adversaries will fill it,” McCaul, a Republican, said of foreign assistance. “A lot of this is authorized into law by Congress. I think only Congress can eliminate it.”
That hasn’t stopped Musk from trying to sidestep Congress repeatedly since joining President Donald Trump’s administration in a temporary role earlier this year. He and his staff have helped shut down an entire agency, moved to fire and lay off many federal workers and have even tried to use the Treasury Department’s payments system to halt congressionally approved funding for programs he doesn’t agree with. While many of the cuts have been held up in court fights, his slash-and-burn approach has been seen as a historic encroachment on lawmakers’ power of the purse.
But lawmakers still do hold that power, and there’s not much to stop them from using it going forward, especially as Musk’s time in the government comes to an end. That’s why conservatives who have tried to slash government spending for years aren’t entirely optimistic about what comes next, even as Republican leaders are trying to make large cuts in their upcoming partisan budget-reconciliation bill.
“One of the most surreal moments this year was at the State of the Union, when my colleagues all got up and clapped because DOGE found all of these cuts and all this wasteful spending,” Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who often wears an electronic national debt-tracker clipped to his suit, told NOTUS on Thursday. “It was all stuff they funded, and all stuff they were going to fund again in the CR. And they were just, like, clapping.”
“They didn’t realize it was actually an insult and an indictment of their own performance,” Massie said. “Not only do we write the checks, we’re responsible for the oversight after we do write the checks. And clearly we failed.”
DOGE hasn’t really had an easier time doing that work than Congress: Its data is often incorrect, riddled with errors. And a NOTUS analysis of Treasury statements found that the government had spent $171 billion more during the first months of Trump’s second presidency than in the same period in the past two years. Musk said on Wednesday night that he still believed slashing $1 trillion was possible, but only if lawmakers were willing to stomach the pushback.
“How much pain is, you know, the cabinet and is Congress going to be willing to take?” Musk wondered at a recent event with reporters. “It can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints.”
With the White House’s potential request for Congress to enshrine DOGE’s cuts into law delayed, the whole project is even more uncertain.
“Congress is supposed to do what DOGE does, so maybe my colleagues will be inspired. But I doubt it,” Massie told NOTUS. “Congress is more just like a vestigial organ of this government. It’s like an appendix. We write strongly worded letters. We express righteous indignation at hearings, and then we just rubber stamp everything we did last year.”
Musk’s work has certainly had far-reaching effects, from ending careers across the federal government to halting health care grants in multiple states to cutting off life-saving medical care abroad after DOGE’s abrupt shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But Musk is no closer to accomplishing what he set out to do: slashing government spending.
“The work that Elon has started here with DOGE is something that we need to continue,” Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida said Thursday. “Everybody talks about waste in the government. Nobody actually goes and examines it. I’m glad we’re examining it.”
Donalds — who was recently heckled about DOGE at a town hall — argued that the political blowback to Musk’s approach was worth it, even if it hasn’t had much of an effect on the government’s overall spending.
“The Democrats are just mad because they lost. They have no strategy, no agenda, no plan. They’re just mad, and they’re just flailing,” he said. “Members of Congress need to be focused on getting our government on a sound footing, not getting scared because you have a handful of people protesting in town halls.”
Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who has frequently called for steep spending cuts, told NOTUS he hopes Musk has inspired some “newfound religion” among his GOP colleagues to tackle budget deficits.
“Elon has been a force for change in the swamp that was needed,” Roy said, adding that he is working on legislation to apply some of DOGE’s methods within Congress, so lawmakers can play more of a role in oversight of government spending.
Massie, for his part, thinks there are plenty of institutional changes that could help Congress do more work to monitor spending, instead of relying on an outside panel like DOGE. One tweak he’d like to see would allow members to hire contractors to do short-term oversight projects instead of relying only on full-time staff.
But, he said, getting serious about spending would also “take a speaker who wants to breathe life back into this institution.”
“Mike Johnson’s stated goal is to carry water for Trump,” Massie complained. “That’s not going to get it done.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.