President-elect Donald Trump’s team has snapped back at claims that Elon Musk is running the show after the billionaire played a significant role in tanking a spending bill that would have averted a government shutdown.
Musk helped topple House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed bipartisan congressional spending bill by slamming it early Wednesay, which was followed later by a joint statement from Trump and JD Vance warning Republicans not to support it.
“Stop the steal of your tax dollars!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X as he threatened funded primary challenges against anyone who voted for the budget deal, a threat Trump later echoed in a post of his own.
The move has left the federal government hurtling toward another shutdown after a Trump-backed plan B deal was voted down in the House on Thursday evening.
The optics have prompted Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to hit back about who is really in charge.
“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR (continuing resolution), Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view,” Leavitt said in a statement to Business Insider. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
After Musk posted comments expressing his objections to Johnson’s bill on his social media platform X, Trump and Vance weighed in with their own opposition to Johnson’s measure on Wednesday, saying it failed to address the national debt ceiling and granted too many concessions to Democrats.
They called on Republicans to abandon it or face a future primary challenge and favor a new “streamlined” alternative instead.
Democrats have mocked the tech billionaire’s heavy-handed influence over the incoming administration.
Leading the Democratic jeering was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote on X: “Democrats and Republicans spent months negotiating a bipartisan agreement to fund our government. The richest man on Earth, President Elon Musk, doesn’t like it.”
“The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania added. “He’s now calling the shots.”
Also enjoying the apparent power struggle within the incoming Trump administration and questioning who is really in charge was David Axelrod, former White House adviser to Barack Obama, who asked on X: “So will President-elect Musk join the budget negotiations now?”
Adding their voices to the row were Democratic representatives Pramila Jayapal and Maxwell Alejandro Frost.
“It’s clear who’s in charge, and it’s not President-elect Donald Trump,” the former wrote.
“Shadow President Elon Musk spent all day railing against Republicans’ CR, succeeded in killing the bill, and then Trump decided to follow his lead.”
