The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Little by little, Republicans in Congress are waking up to an uncomfortable fact. Their own voters are in revolt against Elon Musk’s efforts to tear down the federal government. New reports from CNN and The Bulwark show that Republicans are quietly seeking to tamp down voter angst in all kinds of revealing ways. These are voters in Republican districts, which means they’re Trump voters. Musk is screwing them over, but very few elected Republicans will say this publicly even though Musk is usurping their power—which is exactly the problem here. We’re talking about what this all means with Elizabeth Saunders, a professor of political science and author of a new piece for Foreign Affairs about the threat posed by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Elizabeth, thanks for coming on.
Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: The Bulwark reports that a number of House Republicans are sending their constituents letters designed to tamp down concern about Musk’s DOGE activities. One Republican admits to concerns about Musk’s overreach and his access to private government data. Bulwark reports that this is causing “increasing political anxiety” for GOP lawmakers. Meanwhile, CNN reports that these Republicans are dealing with a deluge of calls from worried constituents. Elizabeth, this is in districts that Republicans represent. That means a lot of Republican voters are unhappy about Musk. What do you think of all this?
Saunders: It’s a very interesting development because we’ve certainly seen some pretty shocking reversals among Republican senators that expressed deep unease based on their subject matter expertise with some of Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions. I’m thinking here of Joni Ernst and her concerns about Hegseth at the Pentagon and Bill Cassidy’s concerns as a doctor with RFK Jr., just to name two. In the beginning, it seemed as though the focus would be on these nominees. The Musk story is penetrating, which I think is very interesting [because] it’s not coming from the traditional sources, which would be debates within the Congress. It’s coming from real voter concern and activism—all these calls to members of Congress. I also think these televised appearances that the Democratic members have made in front of some of these agencies has really been very, very, very important.
Sargent: Such a critical point, Elizabeth. We’re having all these court rulings going against Musk, which is alerting the public to the fact that something’s seriously amiss here. Democrats showing up at government buildings also alerts the public. These things build and feed off of each other in a way that’s really, really important.
Saunders: Yes. And some of the things that I study in my academic work that seem like long-ago irrelevant historical examples really show the dangers of letting this go too long. The Vietnam War—Lyndon Johnson had basically cleared the field of any dissent, and that allowed the war to expand and expand. It wasn’t that there weren’t people who were opposed among the public, but there was no expression of the dovish arguments in the media until it was too late. It was not until there was dissent about the war from Democrats in the media that you began to see the consensus break.
Sargent: I want to flag another remarkable letter that a House Republican from Nebraska sent to constituents. He said that he’d gotten personal assurances from the Treasury secretary that Musk does not have access to Treasury’s payment system, and he vowed that he takes his responsibility for the power of the purse as a member of Congress very seriously. It’s really telling. Republicans know Musk is usurping their power; they know Musk has no business anywhere near the Treasury payment system; and they know that their own voters are anxious and upset about it, yet they’re letting it happen anyway. What does that mean?
Saunders: First of all, assurances from the administration have a really strong Susan Collins is concerned vibe [laughs]. All of these constituent letters [saying] we’re really concerned, we’re on it, trust us—it’s hard to put much stock in that at all. But I do think it is indicative of their concern. They do know that something’s up.
Sargent: I do think it’s actually really telling that Republicans feel the need to tell their constituents that they’re on it.
Saunders: Yes, that is true. These constituent letters are very interesting. They’re getting picked up by the media now, and it’s very interesting that CNN and The Bulwark have analyzed them, but they’re not the first line of getting these sentiments into the public discourse. If you wanted to do that, you would make a speech on the Senate floor, you would give a press conference, and you would make sure that it got on the six o’clock news; or you would go on CNN during prime time or a Sunday show and give a quote live on TV that would then be repeated elsewhere. That’s a much more effective way to do it if you want everyone to hear it all at once. This is a little bit on the down low.
Sargent: In CNN’s report, a number of Republicans are raising issues with Musk’s attacks on the federal government. They’re pointing out that some of their districts have a lot of federal workers in them, that Musk doesn’t have the authority to close whole agencies of the federal government by fiat, and that Musk’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development could actually damage national security. It’s interesting that they’re forced to admit to all these things, even if, as you say, it’s on the down low. I wonder if Musk is giving everyone a crash course in why we need a federal government in the first place. Is that too optimistic, Elizabeth?
Saunders: Government is not something that when you find a problem with it, you just unplug it and plug it back in a minute later. This isn’t a unplug-and-plug-it-back-in situation. By the time everyone really wakes up to this, it is possible that people will have been severed from the government in a way that makes it really hard to reconnect them. People will die.
Sargent: It looks to me like the amount of damage could be really quite incalculable. And to some degree, it’s deliberate. It looks to me like Musk really wants to break the federal government in as many ways that he can. And I don’t know exactly what Trump wants. I think he thinks disruption is good for him—that cliché that chaos is good or whatever that we keep hearing. But it sure looks like these guys don’t really give a shit what the actual consequences are of breaking professionalism in the federal government in a very broad and concerted way.
Saunders: It’s important not to buy into this notion that this is about reforming government. It’s a difficult problem because it plays well politically. And that’s one reason why I think the pointing out of all these Republican down-low concerns is an interesting development because they could sell it at that way. And they still are when they go on CNN or any cable news. It plays well to take the auditing the federal government, but that is not what is happening here.
And I have been thinking a lot about [how] we have so many studies or examples of wanting to institutionalize things—to build institutions, to not forget how we did this thing, or to learn lessons or whatever. We don’t have great theories of how we unwind. There’s not a department of unwinding institutions. It’s hard to unwind institutions that are deeply embedded in other institutions or American life or what have you. It’s hard to even think of examples. So maybe Musk’s attitude is: There’s no way to do this without blowtorching the whole thing.
Sargent: So you raised a really interesting point there, which is that Republican spin about all this is that Oh, the voters hired Trump to disrupt things and shake things up. It sure looks to me like voters are quite alarmed by this shake-up, which is surprising to me because voters tend to like that talk about reform and so forth. Which makes me think that the hubris among Musk and Trump and their whole crew of sledgehammer wielders is so pronounced that they just think they can do anything and they can sell anything. I don’t know how far they’re going to get with public opinion that way, but it’s pretty clear that we’re already seeing a voter backlash to the type of “reform” that they’re trying.
Saunders: After the rewriting of January 6, nothing surprises me anymore with respect to politicians and what they will say to their voters. I do think that this is a really important balancing act that the Republican congressmen and senators are trying to pull off, and which way it goes is crucial for what happens next. They have, as you said, a very good political argument that’s has a long tradition. And this is maybe a super extreme version of it, but they can spin this argument as this is auditing the government, this is cutting waste and fraud. Some of the things they’ve cited are ridiculous and are byproducts, but they’ll always have that [argument].
The fact that they’re talking about it at all at this other level is important, as you say, but if that’s their safety valve and it’s effective enough, they’ll just keep saying the other arguments at the national level. You really have to get them on the record at the national level in a way that breaks through for it to lead to a mass change in Republican opinion. And nothing that Trump has done up to and including January 6—which is to me the breaking point; it’s not a policy difference, it’s an attack on the government and the Constitution—has led them to say, enough.
Sargent: Now it’s starting to look very plausible that Trump and Musk will ignore court orders. JD Vance tweeted that judges aren’t allowed to constrain Trump’s legitimate power. Musk has been tweeting about a judicial coup against Trump. I think this represents another level, another test for Republicans. But as you say, they seem to be eagerly embracing Musk’s and Trump’s abuses of power, despite the assurances to voters. At this point, I can’t see them even condemning the outright defiance of the courts. Then what?
Saunders: Well, I think there’s going to be a breaking point, and it may be defiance of a court order or a Supreme Court ruling. The other place I’d be looking is the military. That could also precipitate a real confrontation, as it almost did in the Lafayette Square case. One question that keeps coming up when you read things is, Well, nobody would think of history, because when I write about old cases—the Vietnam War and the Korean War—the people who actually do speak up and turn on even president of their own party get a lot of play in the cases and the history books that I read. So you do wonder, at a certain point, when they would think of history. And maybe that’s the moment when they will, but by then, arguably, it will be too late.
You do have the sense that there used to be more Republicans with subject matter expertise who cared about the policy—the McCains, the Corkers to some extent. And it used to pay to be really invested in policy. In other words, ambition could be a useful check. At this point, that’s clearly not happening [with] Bill Cassidy voting for RFK Jr, Joni Ernst voting for Hegseth. They’re not going to be a check on policy grounds the way Corker was. At least he would speak out—and others did, too, like Lindsey Graham on Russia and also the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. So there were some examples of pushback, but you’re not going to get policy-related pushback here. The question is whether you’re going to get pushback at that moment of crisis, a January 6–type level crisis like the defying a court order, a confrontation with the military. That’s the real point of no return.
Brian Schatz gave an interview to The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner the other day where he said, “I think you can’t be a senator in private. At some point, you have to do something.” And how much damage this is going to do to the government, to our institutions, to our norms, to the Constitution is going to depend on, he says, “at some point.” Where is that point for congressional Republicans?
Sargent: Unfortunately, it looks like that point is still very far away. Elizabeth Saunders, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Saunders: Thank you. I wish it was under better circumstances.
Sargent: Indeed.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.