On the same day that the clip of Elon Musk trashing House Republicans’ “big, beautiful” bill has been making the rounds, Politico is reporting that the White House has picked back up its effort to force congressional Republicans to choke down some of the DOGE cuts.
In a clip of a CBS News interview the network put out today, Musk said he “was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit … and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
“A bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said in a clip of the interview published Tuesday night, commenting on the legislation that is set to kickstart Trump’s fiscal agenda — if it ever passes the Senate. “But I don’t know if it can be both.”
Now, the White House is reportedly planning to send a chunk of the DOGE cuts to Congress next week in the form of a rescissions package, according to Republicans and senior administration officials who spoke to Politico. When and how much of the DOGE rampage to send over to Congress has been a lingering question for some time.
Of course, as we’ve often noted, the way the White House is handling the rescissions process is constitutionally backwards: Congressional Republican ceded their power to appropriate funding and stand up (or shut down) federal agencies to the executive branch. Under our system of government, of course, Congress approves spending, not the White House. That has been upside-down since January, one of many violations of the separation of powers that came with Trump II. A rescissions package would be a way to begin to paper over that violation — assuming that Congress would approve the DOGE cuts, which is far from a safe assumption.
Some Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) have been quietly hinting since Musk first began his lawless ransacking of the executive branch — freezing and rescinding congressionally appropriate funds and purging federal employees — that he’s aware and concerned that Trump’s DOGE activity might well be not legal until Congress acts. In an acknowledgement of that sentiment, the White House has been privately preparing a rescissions package that would officially claw back some $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid projects and gut NPR and PBS. But the White House has been non committal about when it would actually send over such a package: it was initially going to send something to Congress earlier this spring, but decided to delay while the House and Senate focused on passing Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation package just a few weeks back. The delay has caused some MAGA types like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to start posting on social media about the necessity of such a move.
Just hours after Musk’s clip started making the rounds criticizing the ways in which the House reconciliation package will add to the federal deficit, Trump whisperer Stephen Miller chimed in on Twitter, to correct Musk:
“DOGE cuts are to discretionary spending. (Eg the federal bureaucracy). Under senate budget rules, you cannot cut discretionary spending (only mandatory) in a reconciliation bill. So DOGE cuts would have to be done through what is known as a rescissions package or an appropriations bill.”
Something Strange Afoot In Portage County, Ohio
A webpage on the Portage County, Ohio Republican Party’s website advertising a $99 “training” taking place in the county in June has been taken down after local news outlets and a Democratic state senator caught wind of the upcoming event. The description of the training is unnerving: it is supposedly designed to help teach “communities to identify individuals and organizations hostile to liberty and creatively and lawfully flush them out,” according to a copy of the flyer that was published by WKYC, a local NBC affiliate.
The event is called an “Into Action class” and, it appears, will be hosted by a something called an Allied Special Intelligence Group. The flyer on the local GOP website described the organization using some militia-coded language: a “unique organization of patriots who are military combat veterans with special operations experience, former law enforcement, elected officials and intelligence professionals.”
“By the end of the course students will be organized with a clear operation plan to effectively accomplish specific missions in their communities to reduce the adversaries’ ability to operate, while beginning the process of re-establishing a Constitutional Republic form of government in your communities,” the flyer said.
It’s unclear if the event has been canceled or if the Portage County Republican Party just chose to stop advertising it.
Of Course
The Trump DOJ has filed the first voting complaint of the new administration and it is directly related to the months long election-stealing attempt orchestrated by Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate in the North Carolina Supreme Court race. Griffin tried, and ultimately failed, to get tens of thousands of votes thrown out to try to steal the election from the Democratic incumbent.
Justin Levitt explains the whole ordeal a lot better than I can here, but the Justice Department is alleging that North Carolina violated federal law by not requiring voters to provide the right information when they registered to vote. The basis of Griffin’s challenge revolved around some voters not providing all the identifying information required by law when they registered to vote. However, the state’s voter registration form didn’t ask for it when some of them registered to vote.
More here.
In Case You Missed It
Trump Nominates His Defense Lawyer-Turned-DOJ Yes Man For Federal Appeals Court
Republican Attacks On GAO Escalate After Office Condemns DOGE Cuts
Trump Stonewalls Federal Judges In New Round Of Brazen Defiance
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
The Trump White House and The Great Quieting
What We Are Reading
Migrants, and a Pastor, Arrested Inside Manhattan Immigration Courthouse
Republicans: More debt!
Republicans: No! Lots more debt!!
Republicans: More debt AND tax cuts for the affluent!!!
Our taxes taught them their skills.
Beware those who boast of their patriotism and clam up about our liberty.
I’ll be hitting 70 later this year ( hopefully )and have clear memories of the stories that came out of the old Soviet Union. One was the KGB tactic of getting neighbors pitted against each other. They didn’t actually need to recruit anyone to spy on their neighbors, just give the impression that had. It made people paranoid and suspicious of each other and kept them watching each other instead of watching what their government was doing. That class in Portage County sounds a lot like that, I wonder if the class ever really existed. Maybe it was enough just to get people wondering and suspicious of each others activities. That’s how far things things have gone in just a few months.
Woohoo. Northeastern Ohio opens a real higher-education enterprise – one suitable for this wonderful moment, heralding Trump’s Golden Sage to come. Stasi training! Come and get it! Here in the home of the Goodyear blimp and the birthplace of Lebron James, that traitor n-word who didn’t give his entire career to the Cleveland Cavaliers, which he owed to us Buckeyes for everything we gave him.
"The description of the training is unnerving: it is supposedly designed to help teach “communities to identify individuals and organizations hostile to liberty and creatively and lawfully flush them out,” according to a copy of the flyer that was published by WKYC, a local NBC affiliate.
"The event is called an “Into Action class” and, it appears, will be hosted by a something called an Allied Special Intelligence Group. The flyer on the local GOP website described the organization using some militia-coded language: a “unique organization of patriots who are military combat veterans with special operations experience, former law enforcement, elected officials and intelligence professionals.”
The article is about Trump’s rescission package but Nicole slipped in a reference to his “big, beautiful bill.” Malaprops to her.