Musk kills spending deal, calls for shutdown until Trump is sworn in

Elon Musk, self-described “First mate” by President-elect Donald Trump, went all out to thwart a last-minute funding deal to avert a government shutdown. The move was a direct challenge to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who rolled out the sweeping plan Tuesday night.

Now it looks like Musk has successfully killed the measure in its cradle — before it even came up for a vote.

In a manic frenzy on Wednesday, the world’s richest man bombarded his platform X, formerly Twitter, with attacks on a proposed funding bill that would have kept the government funded until March 14 and had bipartisan support. He also reinforced misinformation about what’s in the 1,500-page bill — as did his nongovernmental commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recommends government spending cuts and regulations for the incoming Trump administration.

Trump himself is against the decisionaccording to a joint statement shared Wednesday by Vice President JD Vance. Various hard-right GOP representatives also vowed to vote against it. Should Johnson fail to pass a spending plan by Dec. 20, the federal government will enter a partial shutdown ahead of the holiday. But it apparently sounded ideal to Musk and his social media clique.

“YES,” Musk commented on an X post by a user who wrote: “Just shut down the government until January 20th. Defund everything. We’ll be fine for 33 days.” In his own postwrote Musk, “No bill should be passed (by) Congress before January 20th when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero.” (Upon Trump’s inauguration, Republican majorities will control both houses of Congress.) Elsewhere, Musk redistributed a meme of himself hacking at the note with a sword, with the text “KILL THE BILL”. In yet another one posthe wrote: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”

Musk personally thanked a number of GOP representatives who announced via X that they voted “no” on the bill, including Reps. Barry Moore, Anna Paulina Luna, Wesley Hunt, Eli Crane, Randy Weber, Michael Cloud, Jeff Van Drew, Warren Davidson, Keith Self, Kevin Kiley and Andy Ogles, many of whom used it as an “omnibus” package of excessive spending and democratic gifts.

The financing bill, HR 10445included provisions to allocate about $100 billion in relief efforts to help Americans recovering from natural disasters in the past two years, about $30 billion in aid to farmers and federal funding to replace the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore . It also would have criminalized revenge porn, given the District of Columbia greater control over the area surrounding the defunct Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium as it tries to bring the Washington Commanders back to the city, addressed issues of transparency in hotel rates and tickets to live events , and implemented health care reforms, including some aimed at lowering prescription drug costs.

More controversially, the bill included a pay raise for members of Congress, justified as a cost-of-living adjustment, a provision that drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. At most, it would have boosted their income by $6,600a 3.8 percent bump from the $174,000 annual salary that most of them receive. The official DOGE account and Musk both falsely claimed that the salary increase would be $69,000 or nearly so 40 percent. Musk, meanwhile, shared a post from a far-right influencer who wrote that the resolution would impose mask and vaccine mandates. Although there was a section on ensuring pandemic preparedness that mentioned the need for accelerated vaccine research, there is no language mandating their administration, nor does the word “mask” appear.

Musk and DOGE as well bought in and spread the false claim that the bill earmarked billions of taxpayer dollars to build a new NFL stadium in Washington, DC, on the site of RFK Stadium. In fact, the resolution said exactly the oppositethat establishes a covenant that “the district may not use federal funds for on-campus stadium purposes, including practice facilities, offices and other structures necessary to support a stadium.”

Other dubious complaints circulating on X were that the bill ensured “Deep state immunity,” which MAGA loyalists interpreted a provision to have been added to protect former Rep. Liz Cheney faces prosecution over her role on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump has said Cheney belongs in prison, and House Republicans released a report yesterday recommending that the FBI investigate Cheney for alleged witness tampering in the congressional testimony of former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Some Republicans also accused the decision of funding “censorship activities” because it expanded support for the Global Engagement Center, an agency within the State Department tasked with identifying and countering “propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing United States policy, security, or stability.”

With the legislation seemingly dead on arrival, Speaker Johnson now has an incredibly narrow window to get a deal done and avert a shutdown. Apparently his backup plan would be to hold a vote on a new “clean” government funding bill, drop the disaster and farm subsidies — as well as other expensive elements of the bill — and send those issues to next year. But cutting some of that spending could cost Democratic support, and some Republican hardliners may still oppose the scrapped deal.

Musk took a victory lap on Wednesday as the odds of Congress passing the original bill collapsed, touting posts about how X — not Musk himself — allegedly had saved the American people from wasted public spending. “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the horrible bill is dead,” he wrote. “The voice of the people has prevailed!”

Or at least the voice of the world’s richest man.