Elon Musk lashed out at Democratic House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries after the congressional spending bill he had insisted on, including a suspension of the debt limit and the removal of a number of concessions to the opposition, tanked in the House of Representatives on Thursday night, leaving the US government hurtling towards another federal shutdown.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution (CR) – which replaced a version he had spent weeks carefully crafting with Democrats after Musk and President-elect Donald Trump abruptly objected to it – was comprehensively voted down by 235 votes to 174.
The debacle sends the speaker back to the drawing board and scrambling against the clock to find an alternative to satisfy all parties before Friday’s midnight deadline.
“A super fair & simple bill was put to a vote and only 2 Democrats in Congress were in favor. Therefore, responsibility for the shutdown rests squarely on the shoulders of Hakeem Jeffries,” the world’s richest man reacted on X, the social media platform he owns, in the aftermath of the humiliating vote.
“Shame on Hakeem Jeffries for rejecting a fair & simple spending bill that is desperately needed by states suffering from hurricane damage!” he added in a follow-up post.
The president-elect, who befriended the SpaceX and Tesla boss in the final months of this year’s presidential election and then appointed him to co-run a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, responded to the debacle in a statement of his own that likewise blamed the opposition.
“Nearly every single House Democrat just voted against government funding and to shut down the government,” Trump said.
“These 197 Democrats voted against keeping the government open, disaster relief, and aid for farmers.
“As Vice President-elect JD Vance said, Democrats ‘asked for a shutdown and I think that’s exactly what they’re going to get.’”
But despite Musk and Trump’s efforts to spread the blame, no fewer than 38 Republicans also refused to back the bill, leaving Johnson in a sweat and a bipartisan deal still needed to avert Christmas chaos in Washington.
Jeffries himself responded with a post on Bluesky that read: “The Musk-Johnson government shutdown bill has been soundly defeated.
“MAGA extremists in the House GOP are not serious about helping working class Americans. They are simply doing the bidding of their wealthy donors and puppeteers. Unacceptable.”
The situation represents the first taste of political defeat for Musk precisely one month before the incoming Trump administration even takes office.
The trouble began on Wednesday when Johnson trailed the original congressional spending bill he had negotiated with Democrats that would have funded the government until March 14 next year and provided $100bn in disaster relief for hurricane-hit states and $10bn for farmers.
Hoping to get the CR signed off so that he and his fellow lawmakers could head home for the holidays, the speaker was caught off guard when Musk began posting his objections to it on X and declared it “should not pass”.
A statement from Trump and Vance duly followed, warning House Republicans not to support it and that they could face a primary challenge if they did, demanding a “streamlined” CR in its place that would suspend or abolish the debt ceiling to allow for further borrowing.
Johnson obediently scrapped his near-1,600 page original agreement in favour of a much slimmer 116-page one giving the president-elect precisely what he wanted, only for Jeffries to dismiss it as “laughable” before handing down a crushing defeat in the House.
Before the vote, Trump had hailed “SUCCESS in Washington!” in a post on Truth Social and backed Johnson ahead of his bid to retain the speakership in January amid growing GOP discontent and MAGA suggestions that the unelected Musk should take his place.
But his team has also been forced to angrily hit back at suggestions from Democrats like Bernie Sanders and others that it is Musk who is the real president-elect and calling the shots.
