When Donald Trump formally announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would be chairing a newly created Department of Government Efficiency in December, many Democrats panned the idea. Not Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). A progressive whose district includes Tesla’s Fremont assembly plant, Khanna argued in a post on X, and later in a series of op-eds and interviews, that Democrats should “work with” Musk and the new agency to “cut spending.” While he would oppose any efforts to cut Social Security or Medicare, Khanna believed there was ample room for common ground in the bloated Department of Defense budget, and followed up with a cheat sheet on where DOGE could start.
Musk has not taken his advice, nor is he merely producing a blue-ribbon report as originally proposed. Instead, DOGE has taken over the gears of government on a mission to belittle federal workers, stop payments, destroy the United States Agency for International Development, and expose what Musk has decided is a massive decades-long conspiracy to rig elections and control the media. With Democrats in Washington slowly waking up to the oligarch in their backyards, how does Khanna feel now about his offer of cooperation? We spoke this week about the Constitutional crisis, his relationship with Musk, and the path forward for DOGE.
You said in December that Democrats should not write off DOGE, and that they should work with Musk on it. Do you still believe that?
Well, I believe that we need to be vociferously opposed to any effort by Elon Musk to stop payments at Treasury or get access to sensitive information, confidential information, of Americans. What I had said is that in terms of the principles—going after wasteful spending—the Defense Department is one where we can do that, and there are areas that we should propose cutting in defense. That I still believe, but that has to be done by Congress. You can’t have an extra-Constitutional effort to stop funding, including Defense, where I think there could be some cuts. I mean, that’s Congress’ authority.
What do you make of what he’s done so far? Right now he’s calling on USAID to “die.”
Well, it’s unconstitutional, it’s wrong, and it’s immoral. I mean, there are millions of children who could die because people are calling for USAID to “die.” Those programs fund anti-malaria sprays that can’t even be paused. They fund AIDS drugs. They fund medical supplies for people who most need it, and it’s less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s not even going after the parts of the federal budget, like Defense, where most of the spending is in the discretionary budget. That’s appalling.
So what did you expect DOGE to look like? From the reports that I’ve seen, it sounds like he’s kind of doing the same thing that he’s done before at Twitter.
I didn’t have any sense of what DOGE would be. I just, I mean, I said I strongly oppose any cuts on Social Security, Medicare, the CFPB, so I didn’t join the DOGE Caucus. But I said the Democrats need to not let Musk dictate the terms of debate, and to say that we also believe that government should be effective and we also understand that there’s wasteful spending, and if you’re really serious about this, focus on the Department of Defense and the Pentagon and let’s work there. Obviously the Democrats have to oppose with every fiber of our being unconstitutional efforts to stop payments at Treasury. You can’t have coders determining what payments are made.
Tesla has been a constituent of yours. Have you talked to Elon Musk about what he’s doing, or have you reached out to him?
I have not, but I don’t think it—you know, I mean, he knows I’m opposed. The last kind of correspondence, he was very disappointed about my vote on Laken Riley and made certain public statements criticizing me. That’s the last correspondence we’ve had. [After we spoke, Khanna missed a House Oversight Committee vote to subpoena Musk, but wrote on X that he would have voted “yes” if he had made it. “Don’t be a dick,” Musk responded.]
Did you see this coming from him? You know, this turn where he’s just kind of taking over an agency and kind of declaring that it’s got to go?
No, because I thought—I think it’s naive. I think he’s going to get struck down in the courts and is causing a lot of heartache and panic, and obviously running Twitter is very different than trying to run the federal government. So I thought that he would try to make recommendations to Congress, but this is just unconstitutional.
You’re saying Democrats need to fight this. What is the response to this? As a minority party, what can you do?
We need to be very clear that this is unconstitutional, we need to be very clear that this is threatening programs that people rely on on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, school funding, and we need to go and be aggressive in the courts and make it clear that there’s no compromise here. There’s no room for collaboration on an unconstitutional effort. I mean, look, if he had recommended certain cuts, and some Democrats had a view that those cuts weren’t reasonable, that’s part of the debate. But this is a question of, Do you believe someone who’s unelected can defy the will of Congress? And the answer to that is a clear no.
