Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday gave his most candid assessment yet of billionaire Elon Musk’s influence in Congress and the potential threat he poses to legislative dealmaking: “He can blow the whole thing up.”
Johnson, during a fireside chat at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center, described his work as speaker as managing a “giant control panel” with dials for his GOP members, one for President Donald Trump and one for Musk.
“Elon has the largest platform in the world, literally,” Johnson said of the X owner and head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. “And if he goes on and says something that’s misunderstood or misinterpreted about something we’re doing, he can blow the whole thing up.”
“So I spend a lot of time working with all these dials and all these folks, and I just run around all day and make sure everybody’s happy,” he added.
Johnson knows the depths of Musk’s influence from personal experience. In December, Musk helped tank a bipartisan government funding bill that the speaker negotiated, triggering chaos on Capitol Hill just before the holidays.
Musk, who is leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy under Trump, has stayed out of Johnson’s latest push to pass a stopgap plan to keep the government open through September. Speaking just after the House passed the bill Tuesday, Johnson called it “a feat” that Republicans were able to do so without needing help from Democrats.
With the funding bill heading to the Senate, Johnson said it would be up to “one man alone” — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — to avert a shutdown Saturday.
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