Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Elon Musk are having something of a bromance on social media, but their budding relationship is unlikely to warm the hearts of federal workers and supporters of clean energy spending.
Lee, the incoming chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee and a hard-line conservative on spending, has interacted with Musk, the billionaire owner of X and Tesla, around 15 times just in the past week. Most of those interactions have involved Musk enthusiastically promoting Lee’s posts.
The topics of those interactions have been varied: overhauling Social Security, accusations of ongoing election fraud and calling the federal government “evil.”
“This thing that @elonmusk talks about — the need to radically de-fang the federal government — is far more urgent than most Americans realize,” Lee said in a post from his personal account, @basedmikelee. “The federal government has truly become evil. It’ll be hard, but we can fix it.”
Musk is reciprocating the glowing reviews as well: “1,000% YES,” Musk posted approving Lee’s recommendations for how Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, should operate.
Lee’s position as the new ENR chair, paired with the ax-swinging zealotry of Musk, could have big implications on agencies in the committee’s jurisdiction, such as the Energy and Interior departments.
Musk and Ramaswamy have pledged to cut the federal workforce across the government as part of their DOGE initiative, which at this point is something of a volunteer effort operating outside the government in conjunction with the incoming Trump White House.
Musk, who spent nearly $200 million to help Donald Trump win the election and used X as a nonstop promotional platform for the president-elect, has mused he could trim $2 trillion in federal spending and eliminate nearly 75 percent of agencies.
“The individual federal employees are mostly not bad people,” Ramaswamy said Wednesday during an event at the Aspen Institute. “I don’t believe that the highest and best use of any of those talented people is what they’re doing in the federal government today.”
Lee, who only met Musk once in person before this week, said the good online vibes between him and the Tesla CEO stem from their agreement that the federal government “has gotten too big.”
Lee had a second chance to meet with him Thursday, when Musk held a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Ramaswamy and a host of Republican lawmakers during a Capitol visit.
“I don’t know exactly where he is on all the energy stuff, but we seem to have a similar appreciation for things like federalism and for the fact that government’s gotten too big,” Lee said in an interview earlier this week. “But yeah, I’ve really only substantially met him through Twitter.”
On Thursday night, the two were back at it again, with Musk championing a 36-post thread by Lee that compared this moment with 1776 and 1861.
It’s unclear how Elon got clued into Lee and why he is relentlessly boosting him. Musk did not respond to an email request for comment.
‘His side won’
Democrats, for their part, are mostly brushing off the impact the cost-cutting consensus between Lee and Musk could have on how the federal government operates. Indeed, some Democrats like Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz and California Rep. Ro Khanna, have already announced they will be joining the newly created House DOGE caucus.
“[Musk] is going gonna be part of that conversation — their side won,” said Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.). “And now it’s like, we want to work with him, and if there’s things we’re gonna agree or disagree on, that’s the business that we’re in on.”
But Democrats may not be as thrilled to learn how Lee and Musk are viewing the substantial clean energy incentives passed under the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.
In his visit to Capitol Hill on Thursday, Musk was asked by POLITICO’s E&E News about his stance on electric vehicle tax credits. Musk reiterated his position: “I think we should get rid of all credits.”
Once again, Lee indicated on X that he is on the same wavelength as Musk.
“The @SenateGOP and @HouseGOP have a rare chance to fix Congress’s broken and destructive approach to federal spending,” Lee said in an X post reacting to a Wall Street Journal article highlighting some Republican support for IRA provisions. “We can’t waste it.”
Lee will have particular free range to examine funding for DOE’s Loan Program Office, which has announced roughly $37 billion in loans or loan guarantees for a host of promising clean energy projects during President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Top Republican energy lawmakers say they see the LPO as a prime target for Trump’s plan to cut costs and increase “efficiency” across federal agencies.
The LPO has also already come under scrutiny by one of the potential DOGE heads. Ramaswamy blasted a recent $6.6 billion loan to Rivian, an electric vehicle maker.
“Biden is forking over $6.6B to EV-maker Rivian to build a Georgia plant they’ve already halted. One ‘justification’ is the 7,500 jobs it creates, but that implies a cost of $880k/job which is insane. This smells more like a political shot across the bow at @elonmusk & @Tesla,” Ramaswamy wrote on X.
Musk’s Tesla did receive a $465 million loan from the office that seeded the company’s growth in 2010, but that fact may not save the program from across-the-board cuts planned by Lee and Musk.
“The progressive era in American government must now come to an end,” Lee said in another post on X. “We have met our enemy. And it’s our own government.”
