Who answers to who? Fox News demands Speaker Johnson defend spending bill to Elon Musk
House Republican leader challenged over tech billionaire’s opposition to latest stop-gap funding deal
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Your support makes all the difference.House Speaker Mike Johnson found himself cornered live on Fox and Friends on Wednesday morning when he was confronted with Elon Musk’s declaration on X that his new congressional spending bill “should not pass.”
The Republican leader was invited onto the Fox News’ breakfast show to discuss the bipartisan deal struck on Tuesday evening for a stop-gap bill to fund the federal government through to March 14. It includes $100 billion for disaster relief and support for farmers among the many provisions outlined across its 1,547 pages.
But Musk – the Big Tech mogul and Trump ally who has become an influential voice in the president-elect’s ear in recent months and now heads the newly-formed advisory Department of Government Efficiency – has already expressed his disapproval of the bill, albeit without going into detail, writing bluntly on his social media platform: “This bill should not pass.”
After introducing a compilation of clips showing members of Johnson’s own caucus on Capitol Hill griping about the bill as “unserious” and referring to it as a “dumpster fire,” Fox co-host Steve Doocy put it to his guest that both Republicans and Democrats are unhappy with him and that their discontent could harm his chances of re-election to the speakership in the new year.
Before Johnson could answer, Doocy continued: “But, you know, and this is breaking news. You do not know. You know who also does not like this? Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, just tweeted: ‘This bill should not pass.’
“The only way you’re going to be able to pass it now, Mr Speaker, is with Democrats. If you could, what’s your message to Elon Musk?”
Recovering after being blindsided by the question, Johnson replied: “Well, I was communicating with Elon last night.
“Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy and I are on a text chain together and I was explaining to them the background of this. And Vivek and I talked last night until about almost midnight. And he said, ‘Look, I get it.’ And he said, ‘We understand you’re in an impossible position. Everybody knows that.’
The speaker continued: “Remember, guys, we still have just a razor-thin margin of Republicans. So any bill has to have Democrat votes. They understand the situation. They said, ‘It’s not directed at you, Mr Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ And I said, ‘Guess what fellas? I don’t either.’
“We’ve got to get this done because, here’s the key, by doing this, we are clearing the decks and we are setting up for Trump to come in, roaring back, with the America First agenda.
“That’s what we’re going to run with gusto beginning January 3, when we start the new Congress, when Republicans again wrench control and all of our fiscal conservative friends, I’m one of them, will be able to finally do the things that we have been wanting to do for the last couple of years.”
Johnson concluded: “Right now, Democrats still control the fence, and that’s the problem. So we’ve got to get this thing done so we don’t have the shutdown.
“So we get the short-term funding measure and we get to March where we can put our fingerprints on the spending.
“That’s when the big changes start and we can’t wait to get there.”
The disagreement between Johnson and Musk exposes what could prove to be a volatile fault line between two key Trump allies, with one seeking to find consensus in Congress and negotiate departmental budgets and the other seeking to trim the fat and slash and burn “excessive” spending wherever he finds it.
It also begs the question of who answers to who and whose priorities will be given preference by the new president once he enters the Oval Office.
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