Republicans in Congress have largely wasted the first month of their new majorities bickering over how much spending to cut, which issues to prioritize, and how many bills to put forward. Whether they have the votes to enact their ambitious agenda remains unclear, but they’ve shown that they have just enough to fulfill an equally important purpose: make sure President Donald Trump can wage his assault on the federal government unimpeded.
Under the GOP’s watch, Congress has put up virtually no resistance while Trump and Elon Musk have shut down agencies, sidelined thousands of federal employees, and stopped congressionally approved payments. Instead of protecting their constitutional authority over spending, Republicans have cheered Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and mocked Democrats for their protests. “In hopes of finding themselves,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Tuesday, “they’ve latched on to this new, shiny object called the rule of law.”
The GOP’s acquiescence is one more sign of how tightly Trump now controls his party. But it also reveals something fundamental about Republicans’ haphazard attempts over the past two decades to reduce the size and scope of government. For all of the party’s fulminating about the nation’s debt and deficits, Republican lawmakers have shied away from taking votes to slash spending that could prove unpopular with voters. Now they’re content to let someone else gut the government for them—and take whatever political heat comes with it.
[David Deming: DOGE is failing on its own terms]
“They’re trying to have it both ways—cheering those who are doing this work for DOGE while not having their name on the actual bills,” former Representative Bob Good of Virginia told me. Good, the previous chair of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, left Congress last month after losing in a GOP primary. He’s a fan of DOGE, but he has watched begrudgingly as some of his ex-colleagues have applauded cuts to government bureaucracies such as USAID and the Department of Education that they refused to effect through legislation. When a fellow conservative offered an amendment in 2023 to slash USAID funding by half, Good noted, a majority of Republicans voted alongside Democrats to defeat it. “They won’t suffer any risk or show any courage,” Good said.
Former Representative Reid Ribble of Wisconsin told me that Musk is serving as a “patsy” for Republicans in Congress and for Trump, who has allowed the billionaire to shoulder the brunt of attacks from Democrats over DOGE. “They can now pass off responsibility—and, more importantly, accountability—to the nonelected person that’s doing this,” Ribble told me.
Ribble was part of the House GOP Tea Party class of 2010, which swept Democrats out of the majority in part by promising to curb federal spending. Although deficits did come down over the ensuing years, Republicans new to Washington discovered that rolling back government was easier said than done. They also chafed at then-President Barack Obama’s attempts to circumvent congressional gridlock with executive actions. As Obama used to say, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”
The strategy infuriated conservatives, recalled former Representative Joe Walsh, an Illinois Republican and a onetime Obama antagonist who has since become a vocal Trump critic. “When Barack Obama even looked at a pen, Jim Jordan and I would scream,” Walsh told me, referring to the Trump loyalist who helped co-found the Freedom Caucus. Now, he noted, the same conservatives who challenged Obama’s unilateral moves are fine with Trump’s much more brazen use of executive authority.
Ribble told me that he’d recently implored a GOP House member to “jealously guard” Congress’s power over spending. “Because every single time you acquiesce to the executive,” Ribble said he told the lawmaker, “you’re giving them power and precedent for the next guy to do the exact same thing.” His advice seemed to fall flat. According to Ribble, the Republican replied: “Yeah, but I like what they’re doing.”
Not all Republicans in Congress seem thrilled. A few, such as Senator Susan Collins of Maine, have objected to the power that Trump has given Musk. And others have worked to ensure that their own priorities—or those of their constituents—remain funded. But on the whole, congressional Republicans have either applauded DOGE’s actions, defeated Democratic attempts to subpoena Musk, or stayed quiet. If anything, the uproar over Musk’s campaign has helped obscure their own squabbling.
For more than a month, Republicans in the House and the Senate have been unable to agree on the sequence or scope of legislation to advance Trump’s agenda. Senate Republicans want to first pass a bill to send money to bolster the southern border and the Pentagon before turning to an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. House Republicans, however, want to package the border funding, tax cuts, and spending reductions into what the president has vaguely described as “one big, beautiful bill.” Trump has provided little direction, and the two chambers have awkwardly raced against each other this week to advance their preferred legislation in hopes of forcing lawmakers in the other chamber to relent.
[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]
A major factor slowing Republicans down is the narrowness of their majorities, especially in the House, where the party will need virtual unanimity to pass anything without help from Democrats. Good said he hopes that Republicans in Congress will codify the temporary cuts that Trump and Musk have made, but he has his doubts. “If we don’t do it in the first year,” Good said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have tried in vain to force Trump and Musk to revive parts of the government that the two have all but closed, including USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They have won some early victories in court but don’t have the votes to act on their own in Congress. Democrats’ best opportunity may come next month, when lawmakers will have to pass legislation to keep the government from shutting down entirely. In recent years, Republicans have turned to Democrats for help in these funding fights, fearful that voters will blame them for the loss of services that would result if the government closes. But some Democrats worry that they’ll have less leverage under Trump, who presided over the longest shutdown in history during his first term and has single-handedly frozen large agencies in his second. “We already know that he is at best indifferent to the consequences of a government shutdown,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told me. “He’s not afraid of it.”
Connolly and his colleagues may have to hope that GOP lawmakers—who face voters next year, unlike Trump—come to fear a popular backlash. Republicans have laid low during the chaotic early days of Trump 2.0, using their majorities for little else besides protecting the president and confirming his Cabinet. But soon, the responsibilities they’ve elided—funding the government and keeping it running—will fall squarely on them.