Quotations from the linked article:
This year, as has become the usual practice, Congress waited until the last possible moment to plop the text of the Continuing Resolution on the desks of our Conscript Fathers. What had started as a twenty-page document had lizzoed into a 1547-page behemoth. This was no “continuing resolution” but a porker full of self-serving giveaways to Congress as well as numerous woke initiatives designed to stymie the incoming Trump administration.
This monstrosity was stopped, but how? Critics of Musk blame him. “He tweeted about our beloved monstrosity,” they skirled. “He killed the bill.”
But this is wrong. Musk did indeed post, with Olympic assiduity, about the egregious piece of self-serving lard. But what scotched the original bill was the public outcry. Musk may have been the catalyst, the tocsin in the night. The fire brigade was manned by ordinary citizens.
As one social media poster put it, “All Elon did was read a bill, post on a public platform that the reckless spending in it was unacceptable, ask others to contact their representatives if they agreed, and made clear that he will help primary Ds + Rs who support it.”
This is exactly right. But to listen to the Dems, you would think the world was coming to an end.
In the event, the final bill, called the American Relief Act, 2025, passed in the opening minutes of Saturday, December 21. It was the third version of the CR. At some 120 pages, it is less than a tenth as long as the original Brobdingnagian version. Who applied the Ozempic? Notwithstanding the wailing of the Dems, it wasn’t Elon Musk. It was the duly elected representatives of the people who, caught with their hands in the cookie jar, withdrew almost all the pork and politically noxious provisions of the original. It was a big win for Trump.
What tipped the scale? I suspect that a widely circulated picture of the original bill side by side with its slimmed-down cousin had people aghast and searching for their congressman’s telephone number. Donald Trump had wanted them to raise the debt ceiling now, presumably so he wouldn’t have to do it on his watch, but they denied him that concession. It was about the only one they did deny him.
There are two main lessons to be drawn from this episode. One is that timely, forceful, and rapidly repeated exposure of government malfeasance can prompt the public to intervene and end it. Musk is accounted a villain by the left because he repeatedly shone a klieg light on the worst aspects of the adipose abomination that was the original bill. Somehow, no one had been so effective a town crier before.
The second lesson has to do with the utterly irresponsible, but by now habitual, process that Musk helped to expose. The insidious practice of turning to “continuing resolutions” as a substitute for timely legislation is an invitation to corruption. The Dems have eagerly accepted the invitation, injecting all manner of tendentious (and, it may go without saying, expensive) desiderata into the annual CR fest, convinced that the public won’t notice.
The remedy is twofold: 1. Insist that proposed legislation be published well in advance of its deadline and 2. disaggregate the pieces of any proposed legislation so that each bill covers only a single subject. No more sneaking woke expedients into general spending legislation at the last minute.
Mentions of “spending” bring me to the existential pressure that first prompted Musk and Ramaswamy to embark on their quest for “government efficiency”: out-of-control, potentially paralyzing government spending. Together with the regulatory nightmare that the bureaucratic state has saddled us with, incontinent spending (the federal debt is currently north of $36 trillion ) threatens to impoverish the United States and, hence, the world.to embark on their quest for “government efficiency”: out-of-control, potentially paralyzing government spending. Together with the regulatory nightmare that the bureaucratic state has saddled us with, incontinent spending (the federal debt is currently north of $36 trillion) threatens to impoverish the United States and, hence, the world.
Musk has said that he hopes to trim government spending by $2 trillion per annum. If he and Vivek can manage a quarter of that, they will be national heroes. In fact, they already are.