
Luzia Geier/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Democratic members of Congress hold a press conference outside the USAID building in Washington, February 3, 2025.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk and his team of 20-somethings functionally shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been the country’s foreign aid department since JFK was president. It’s a move that exemplifies the immense power Musk has been given—on X Spaces Monday, Musk said that President Trump “agreed we should shut it down,” a concerning insight into who is actually calling the shots.
As Musk dismantles an agency that provides $40 billion in critical funding around the world, a potential prelude to unconstitutionally deleting other spending he doesn’t like that has been appropriated by Congress, Democrats have been mustering a response.
In an email to the House Democratic caucus Monday morning, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries laid out a strategy for the party. Many of his ten bullet points were continuations of work that’s already being done, but he did lay out plans to meet the moment.
Jeffries told the caucus that Democrats will introduce a bill to prevent unlawful access to the federal payment system that contains confidential information about Social Security and Medicare recipients, nonprofits, businesses, and federal contractors. Musk has reportedly gained access to this Department of the Treasury payment system, allowing him to access sensitive data about Americans and potentially tamper with the flow of $6 trillion worth of payments that goes through the system. After clashing with Musk about access to the payments system, Treasury’s highest-ranking career official, David Lebryk, left the department. Other senior Treasury officials are reportedly on administrative leave after trying to keep DOGE out of the system.
Jeffries also set a line in the sand using the March 14 federal funding deadline, telling Democrats that he “made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner.”
Meanwhile, several congressional Democrats joined protests on Monday outside of the USAID building, which is empty after staffers were told to stay out. The group includes Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Gerry Connolly (D-VA), and Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), as well as Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Chris Murphy (D-CT).
“What Trump and Musk are doing is not only wrong, it’s illegal. USAID was created by an act of Congress. It can only be undone by an act of Congress,” Rep. Beyer told press at the protest.
“Elon, if you want to run USAID, get nominated by Donald Trump and go to the Senate and good luck getting confirmed,” Rep. Connolly said.
Executive branch confirmations are one of the few things Congress has that Trump wants, and so another strategy has emerged for Senate Democrats in the wake of Musk’s unconstitutional takeover. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who also spoke in front of the USAID building on Monday, has threatened to stall the confirmation of all Trump nominees until the administration ends its attack on USAID. After Monday’s press conference, Sen. Van Hollen said that he would join Schatz in the block of nominees. In the Senate, just one senator can jam up the nomination process, which would leave a number of federal agencies without leadership, at least frustrating Trump’s policy agenda.
In the whirlwind of Trump’s first two weeks in office, Democrats have rightly come under fire for their passive responses to the administration’s assaults on the government. After the now-rescinded Office of Management and Budget memo put a pause on all federal spending, Jeffries scheduled an “emergency meeting” for … the next afternoon. The more concrete threat of withholding nominations and grinding the business of the Senate to a halt, especially with a government shutdown looming next month and the nation’s borrowing limit just after that, marks a change in the party’s willingness to play hardball to defend the government from Musk.