On the menu today: Another busy day. Up on Capitol Hill, Democrats really think they’ve got something with the rallying cry, “Nobody elected Elon Musk.” While that’s accurate enough as it goes, it implies that Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency — a new name on the old U.S. Digital Service office — are some sort of long-hidden trap sprung on the American people. But Trump talked about putting Musk in charge of this task all autumn long. Meanwhile, new reporting from Reuters confirms that President Biden and his administration slow-walked military aid to Ukraine in his final year in office, for fear of provoking Vladimir Putin; and Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba included a surprisingly direct warning to China’s Xi Jinping.
Americans Elected the Guy Who Pledged He Would Give Elon Musk This Task
On February 8, Democrats held a “Nobody elected Elon!” rally outside the U.S. Treasury Department.
It’s become the party’s new rallying cry. Maxine Waters, who has served in public office since 1976 and who is 86 years old, said at the rally, “We have got to tell Elon Musk, ‘Nobody elected your a**.’” Democratic members of Congress Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico have introduced the ‘‘Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act,” which declares any special government employee in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency “shall be liable for any claim against the federal government relating to activities of the department.”
It is true that no one cast a ballot for Musk in 2024. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, and is ineligible to be president under the U.S. Constitution. But no one in the president’s cabinet was elected to their jobs, other than the vice president. Back in 2020, nobody voted to put Alejandro Mayorkas in charge of the border, Antony Blinken in charge of foreign policy, Jake Sullivan in charge of national security, or Janet Yellen in charge of the economy. You don’t vote for the guys around the president, other than the vice president. You vote for a president, who selects his team and, in positions where it’s required, gets them confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
And Donald Trump gave America plenty of advance notice that he intended to put Musk in a role looking for ways to cut federal spending.
Back on August 20, Trump publicly mused about bringing on Musk as an adviser. “He’s a very smart guy. I certainly would, if he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy.”
That day, Musk responded on X, “I am willing to serve,” and posted an AI-generated image of himself at a podium with the label, “Department of Government Efficiency.”
On August 23, Trump said of Musk on The Shawn Ryan Show:
“He is a brilliant guy. And what he really would like to do is get involved in cutting some of the fat, and he does know how to do it. And he loves the country. You know, it’s just an amazing thing . . . he wants to be involved. Now, look, he’s running big businesses and all that, so he can’t really — I don’t think he’d be in the cabinet. I’d put him in the cabinet, absolutely, but I don’t know how he could do that with all the things he’s got going. But he can sort of, as the expression goes, consult with the country and give you some very good ideas.
On September 5, in a speech at the New York Economic Club, Trump pledged:
At the suggestion of Elon Musk . . . I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. We need to do it. Can’t go on the way we are now. And Elon, because he’s not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. It’d be interesting. If he has the time, he’ll be a good one to do it, but he’s agreed to do it.
On October 24, on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk talked about his desire to roll out a new and advanced version of his software for full-self-driving cars on the roads, and said, “If there’s a Department of Government Efficiency, I’ll try to help make that happen.” (Note the autopilot feature requires state government approval, not federal government approval.)
At Trump’s October 27 Madison Square Garden rally, Musk was introduced as “the co-founder of the Department of government efficiency, DOGE,” and Musk told the crowd that in terms of cost savings, “I think we could do at least 2 trillion.”
You can’t argue that Trump sprung this on the American people with no warning. So, no, Americans did not elect Elon Musk, but they did elect the guy who clearly laid out that he was going to assign this task to Musk.
By the way, DOGE is just the new name assigned to the United States Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by President Obama to be “a small team of America’s best digital experts [who] will work in collaboration with other government agencies to make websites more consumer friendly, to identify and fix problems, and to help upgrade the government’s technology infrastructure.” (Note the U.S. Digital Service website still exists, unchanged.)
The other aspect of the “nobody elected Musk” argument is the implication that Musk is making the decisions and Trump is just blithely signing off on them. Images like the most recent cover of Time are indisputably an effort stir up divisions between two powerful men with considerable egos. And considering the history of Trump and Musk, this partnership is not designed to last forever.
The thing is, if you’re a critic on the left, would you rather have this administration’s immigration policies influenced by Musk, or Stephen Miller? Would you rather have Trump’s trade policies shaped by Peter Navarro? Musk is pro-free-markets and deregulation, he says climate change is real and opposed the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, and he opposes government subsidies (as opposed to high-dollar government contracts).
I’d ask the media, why are you trying to drive this guy out? He’s the counterbalance to the more populist forces in the Trump administration!
This does not mean that DOGE is running perfectly. Yes, in theory, Musk posts a lot about what DOGE is doing on X. But Musk’s feed on X is a firehose of serious posts, memes, videos, jokes, re-posts, etc. The only way to get updates on what the Musk-headed advisory commission is doing is to follow Musk on the social-media platform that Musk owns. That is not how the U.S. government is supposed to communicate to the public.
It would be preferable if DOGE had a website where everyone could see what it had found, what it had recommended the president cut, and what cuts had actually been enacted. The final call must rest with the president, and it would probably be good to see Trump reject at least one of Musk’s proposed cuts, just to demonstrate he’s not a rubber stamp.
And as John Yoo laid out for us, we’re probably going to need a Supreme Court decision that clarifies the law on impoundments and the circumstances when a president can refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated.
Also, if you want to increase transparency about what USAID was doing, don’t take down the website of USAID. (The good news is, you can still find just about all the data on the federal government’s spending through USASpending.gov, including past USAID spending.) But you can’t increase transparency and accountability to the public by taking down websites.
Biden and His Team Slow-Walked Ukraine Aid Throughout 2024
I made a passing reference to it in my Post column, but this Reuters report deserved a LOT more attention than it received:
In the final year of President Joe Biden’s term, decisions on key shipments and weapons in Ukraine were stalled not just by months of congressional delays, but also by internal debates over escalation risks with Russia, as well as concerns over whether the U.S. stockpile was sufficient, a Reuters investigation found. Adding to the confusion was a chaotic weapons-tracking system in which even the definition of “delivered” differed among U.S. military branches.
Delays were worst during the months it took Congress to pass $60 billion in supplemental aid for Ukraine, held up by opposition from Donald Trump and congressional Republicans amid Trump’s successful run for president. But the jam continued well after the money was approved, according to a Reuters analysis of official announcements, U.S. spending data and interviews with more than 40 Ukrainian and American officials, congressional aides and lawmakers. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security deliberations. . . .
But despite the Biden team’s billing of the later announcements as a surge in aid from October through Inauguration Day, monthly aid from the U.S only reached the $1.1 billion monthly average established during the first two years of the war, the analysis found.
By November, just about half of the total dollar amount the U.S. had promised in 2024 from American stockpiles had been delivered, and only about 30% of promised armored vehicles had arrived by early December, according to two congressional aides, a U.S. official, and a lawmaker briefed on the data.
This approach amounted to generating the worst of both worlds. Critics of assisting Ukraine got to point to the high numbers and complain that we were sending so much equipment over there, while the Ukrainians were stuck there, under fire, waiting for promised military equipment moving at the speed of a passing kidney stone. (Yes, I’m biased on this issue; when you’ve had 31 Russian ballistic and cruise missiles fired at the city you’re sleeping it, you become a Patriots fan, in the form of the U.S. air-defense system.)
All year long, I told readers that the aid to Ukraine was coming in slow-moving dribs and drabs — and no matter what you think of helping Ukraine, it is an extremely ominous sign that the U.S. couldn’t move a lot of military equipment to an ally that it literally right next to NATO ally Poland, with the decent-sized Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport 50 miles from the Ukrainian border. If resupplying Ukraine is difficult, how easy do you think resupplying Taiwan or any other ally is going to be?
ADDENDUM: Shortly after Trump took office, this newsletter explained why the U.S. alliance with Japan is more important than ever, and last week it examined the burgeoning odd couple relationship between Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Donald Trump.
William Chou and Masashi Murano of the Hudson Institute notice that Ishiba’s meeting with President Donald Trump included a joint statement that was a surprisingly blunt message to Beijing:
Most surprisingly, in their statement Ishiba and Trump said they “opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion,” in reference to the Taiwan Strait. This newly introduced language demonstrates that Tokyo and Washington are focused on China’s increasing grey-zone tactics, such as the use of quarantine or a de factoblockade with law enforcement and paramilitary vessels, along with the possibility of an outright invasion of the islands.
That’s about as clear a “don’t try anything stupid or reckless regarding Taiwan” statement to Xi Jinping as we’re likely to get from President Trump, and it is welcome. A bit more than a year ago, Trump made comments to Maria Bartiromo that made it sound like he perceives Taiwan more as an economic competitor than as a strategic ally or as a democracy worth defending.