Tech billionaire Elon Musk is working to shut down government agencies and cancel congressionally approved funding — and many Republican lawmakers are just fine with it.
“He’s doing exactly what he should be doing,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Monday night. “He’s going through every agency and looking at how to make sure the money’s spent right.”
Wait, isn’t that explicitly the role of Congress?
“It doesn’t look like Congress is doing their job,” Scott answered simply.
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Lawmakers have delegated plenty of powers to the president in recent decades, to shape policy and to use special authorities during emergencies. But members from both parties have long seen the power of the purse, as laid out in the Constitution, as their sole domain, zealously protecting it from executive overreach — let alone a takeover by an unelected businessman.
Until now, at least.
In interviews on Monday night, Republican senators — including members of the Appropriations Committee tasked with setting funding levels — dismissed Musk’s moves to consolidate his power and seize sensitive government systems to shut down spending. They say that Musk, in rejecting appropriations laws passed by Congress, is simply following Trump’s priorities.
Some, like North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”
“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
Other Republicans argued that Musk is making the government more efficient, and they said they’re glad — if nobody on Capitol Hill is going to slash spending — that someone has finally taken charge.
“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty said. “The agency is out of control.”
And Sen. John Hoeven said “they need to be accountable.”
“They’re somehow operating like they’re this independent agency doing their own thing,” he claimed.
The United States Agency for International Development delivers medicine and food to crisis zones around the world. It is funded by Congress and answers to Congress. But GOP lawmakers are generally happy to be spectators while it is dismantled.
“Mr. Musk is acting under the authority of the president of the United States,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters. “It’s perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional. And the issue, anyway, is not process. The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?”
Others insisted Musk’s portfolio is normal.
“He’s working with the president, and they’re making recommendations in some cases on agencies,” South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS. “But the whole program here is that we’re spending way more money than what we’re bringing in.”
Musk is making more than recommendations. His aides have demanded access to key Treasury Department systems and government databases, and he has promised to stop payments to contractors and nongovernment organizations that Congress appropriated by law. On Monday, USAID was closed to employees as the Trump administration made plans to fold it into the State Department.
Rounds, though, was unfazed.
“The president has the authority to operate the executive branch of government,” he said. “So.”
Trump told reporters on Monday morning that Musk has “access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him.”
“Where we think there’s a conflict or a problem, we won’t let him go near it,” Trump added.
Other lawmakers didn’t answer questions about whether flouting laws passed by Congress is illegal. Arkansas Sen. John Boozman repeatedly said he had “no comment” on the matter. Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker promised, cryptically, that “people will be looking at that and discussing it back and forth.” And Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said members are “all trying to figure out what happened today.”
A couple of Republican senators seemed slightly more troubled.
Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said she was “very concerned about Mr. Musk or any of his assistants going into federal agencies and demanding personal information on employees.”
Musk’s moves, she said, haven’t met “the requirements of the law.”
Texas Sen. John Cornyn said that for the international development agency to be absorbed by the State Department, “it requires congressional action.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said she wants to “make sure that we hold the power of the purse,” which she told NOTUS is “one of our fundamental constitutional responsibilities.”
But she’s not sure if Musk has overstepped on that.
“I don’t really know who has the right to do what,” she said. In this instance, she hypothesized, Republicans have been frustrated by not having enough answers on where foreign-assistance money is going. “This is an outgrowth of that.”
One former GOP Senate aide had harsh criticism for making unilateral, unconstitutional decisions about entire agencies based on frustration alone.
“I see a lot of people want to throw out 230 years of constitutional government and replace it with an authoritarian dictator because they have big feelings about the budget and can’t be bothered to work through Congress,” wrote Brian Riedl, a former staffer for retired Ohio Sen. Rob Portman.
“It is absolutely a constitutional crisis,” he said. “The president has zero legal authority to ‘shut down,’ defund, or otherwise cripple a $50 billion agency.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS. Shifra Dayak and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
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