Republicans Get Elon Relief. Dems Are Outta Luck.
Plus: A senator wonders, were the stocks too high?
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made sweeping, unilateral cuts to federal funds, and these cuts are quite unpopular, particularly with members of Congress who want federal services to stay intact (at least in their districts) to keep their voters happy. All across the country, field offices for popular government programs such as Social Security are closing, and employees are being shown the door. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to stop it—unless, of course, you’re a Republican with Elon Musk’s ear.
The White House insists that Musk isn’t the one wielding the DOGE axe, notwithstanding Trump’s claim in his address to a joint session of Congress that DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk.”1 But Republican lawmakers know well that the way to get around the devastating cuts and exponentially growing “customer-service problems” is simple: Just get some face time with Elon, Schrödinger’s DOGE head.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) chairs the House Appropriations Committee, which manages how federal funds are allocated; he said Friday that “common sense has prevailed” after securing exemptions from DOGE cuts affecting three critical government offices in his district—a National Weather Center, a Social Security office, and an Indian Health Services office.
In another instance, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) managed to get the administration to release grant money for dairy farmers after going “eyeball to eyeball” with Musk. Wisconsin’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, had no such luck.
It’s hardly sustainable for lawmakers to personally reach Musk by phone if they want to keep money and services flowing for their constituents. And even those lawmakers who support impoundment—the president’s ostensible power to slash congressionally appropriated funding at will—have been left trying to at least feign sympathy for their congressional colleagues.
“Look, everybody should have input,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who has been largely supportive of DOGE. “The administration’s gotta make decisions on what is effective and what’s not. Nobody’s gonna shut down the distribution of Social Security checks.”
It was unclear if by “everybody,” Roy meant everybody or just every Republican. As for the impacts DOGE is having on Social Security, Roy seemed un-bothered by reports that Social Security Administration offices are being marked for closure.
“They’re gonna do their work to get Social Security [checks] out and accounts handled. So I’m not all that worried about that,” he said. “But in terms of like, members that are calling—everybody’s got input, right? But you gotta cut the waste.”
In the end, I did manage to find one Republican lawmaker who wasn’t as gung-ho about the executive branch ignoring the will of Congress. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told me that “for any of these [DOGE cuts] to be permanent—to have any lasting effect—we’re gonna have to legislate on it in terms of what we appropriate [or] what we don’t.” Hawley added that while he’s by and large a fan of the cuts DOGE is making, Congress had to codify them through legislation:
So what I’m monitoring from my state is—I love the president—sending people back to work or firing them if they won’t. I love the getting rid of the ridiculous spending and waste that we’re seeing in stuff like USAID. I’m not a fan of USAID. I’d love to get rid of that agency, just to be honest with you. Everybody—the Democrats think, “Oh, you’re destroying the agency!” I would love to destroy that agency and give its few responsible duties squarely to the State Department. So I’m a fan of all of that.
Otherwise, when we’re talking about cutting, okay, what does that look like? My bottom line is, I want the services that my constituents are paying for, I want them to be delivered to them with excellence. I want the [Veterans Affairs] open, I want it running really well, I want the best medical care we can get for veterans. I want the conservation offices open.
When I asked Hawley about the Social Security Administration office closures specifically, he said, “They need to be open. That’s not helpful.”
“People need to be able to go and get answers,” he added. “This is exactly the kind of thing—they’ve gotta be able to go. . . . Listen, for years now in my state at least—and many, I bet, because federal workers have been working remote—the big complaint is they’ll show up to these offices and nobody’s there, and it’s like, ‘Call the following number.’”
“So my view is, we need to be getting people back into those offices,” Hawley concluded. “We ought to be making sure we’re delivering excellent service. . . . Cut a bunch of federal workers? I’m all for that—just so long as the service the people pay for remains outstanding.”
If Hawley is interested in keeping those SSA offices well staffed, he could simply call Musk. It’s unclear if he’ll do that.
In certain communities and cultures, simply “knowing a guy” is the way to get business done or secure special treatment.2 In a Congress that likes to extol the virtues of equal representation, the same dynamic is giving Capitol Hill the feeling of a zoo in which the most dominant primates get to keep their bananas. And simian politics is not for the faint of heart.
The stocks are too damn high
In a Monday interview with Fox News’s Larry Kudlow, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) suggested the stock market’s recent nosedive was reasonable, even justifiable, because things had simply gotten too lucrative.
The only problems you have with these tariffs is there’s always a scoreboard, and that’s going to be the stock market. And people are looking at the stock market, like, “Hey, this is how it’s going to continue to be for months and months and months.” That’s not gonna happen. You know, we were probably over-bloated with the stock market here for a while. We went up quite a bit. But at the end of the day, it’s about fairness. It’s about having fair tariffs—everybody on the same page—and again, we’ve got—President Trump has put together a smart group of people that understand a lot about the dollar and a lot about foreign currency, all the things that are going on. At the end of the day, it’s all gonna work out.
The idea that the stock market, where millions of Americans’ retirement accounts ride the waves of finance and occasionally sink beneath them, could have gotten high enough to need a correction—I found this view quite strange. So, later Monday evening, I asked Tuberville to elaborate on his statement that the market was “over-bloated.”
“It’d gone way up, you know, probably over-priced,” he said. “In a short period of time it had really gone up, and so it probably reset itself a little bit.”
Asked whether the market could get back to the same level, Tuberville said, “No doubt.”
I noted that the consensus has been that the market dive was a direct result of Trump’s tariffs and the economic instability they bring. Tuberville said that more tariffs coming at the start of next month would right the ship. (He did not make clear how exactly this righting would be achieved.)
“They don’t last forever, I mean,” Tuberville added. “The reciprocals are gonna be, what, April 2nd? So it’ll be good. Bye, bye, bye.”
For what it’s worth, I checked the handy Autopilot app3 to see how Tuberville’s portfolio is performing over the past three months. He was down 6.9 percent as of Monday.4
America first, now last
Regular Press Pass readers are no strangers to one of our newsletter’s most well-trod paths, which leads through grim reporting from the dim precincts of our crumbling legislative branch to arrive at a bright and uplifting story about pants manufacturing. Well, today, we’re venturing a little ways off that path.
The United States was once the world leader in high-quality blue jeans. Those days are long gone, with America ceding its title to Japan, which has for years been the finest producer in selvedge denim. Wilbur Ross, a businessman who sailed to confirmation as secretary of commerce during Trump’s first term, helped land a killing blow to American denim when he sold the parent company of Cone Mills, which operated the last domestic selvedge denim mill in Greensboro, North Carolina, to a private equity firm. Less than a year later, that firm shuttered the mill, and the looms went silent.
Now, almost a decade on from the White Oak Mill closure, there’s a longshot attempt to salvage the selvedge. GQ’s Jeremy Freed writes:
Most of the world’s selvedge used to be produced in the United States—much of it at White Oak—but changing technology and the fashion industry’s relentless pursuit of ever-lower labor costs have pushed American textile manufacturing, and American-made selvedge, to the brink of extinction. Nowadays, most high-end selvedge is produced in Japan, a country whose economy supports a thriving ecosystem of textile mills and homegrown specialist denim brands. If you own a pair of selvedge jeans, whether they’re from a big brand like Levi’s or denim-head cult like Iron Heart, the fabric was probably milled in Japan.
In 2018, when Vidalia Mills moved into its factory—a 900,000-square-foot former Fruit of the Loom distribution center—the company’s stated ambition wasn’t just to pick up where White Oak left off, but to create an entirely new business model. As a vertically integrated denim mill, it promised to turn sustainably produced American cotton into an array of fabrics, including traditional selvedge, and create hundreds of jobs in the heart of the Cotton Belt. With White Oak’s demise still fresh, and a growing enthusiasm for authentic American workwear here and abroad, it seemed almost too good to be true. . . .
The dream, however, was short-lived. After encountering quality-control issues, customer service problems, and unfilled orders, McCann eventually gave up on Vidalia in 2024. What exactly went wrong isn’t clear, and no one from within the company is currently talking about it publicly, but by last fall things were looking increasingly dire. In September, Vidalia Mills announced a rebrand while attempting to raise $7 million to “overcome funding delays and scale operations.” In October it reportedly laid off 30% of its workforce. A month after that it shut down operations and locked its gates.
Correction (11 a.m. EDT March 12): An earlier version of this article incorrectly located Cone Mills’s shuttered denim plant in White Oak, North Carolina. The White Oak Mill is actually in Greensboro.
Trump’s slipup immediately became part of the ongoing legal fight against DOGE’s authority. It’s hard for a lawyer to claim that some anonymous or unknown other is the chief decisionmaker for the organization when the president makes a statement to the contrary in front of tens of millions of viewers.
If you ask a restaurant or local business to call you a cab in the small towns along Lake Como, there’s a strong chance that the driver who shows up will just be their one friend who owns a big-enough car. It’s not a fair system, but it’s cheaper than Uber. Just make sure to negotiate the rate before hitting the road.
Autopilot is an app that tethers your brokerage account to major money movers and politicians. It’s fun to look at and see just how much better (or worse) certain individuals perform compared to major hedge funds.
Disclosure: I have a modest sum invested in the portfolio that tracks Nancy Pelosi’s public disclosures. It’s down 18.9 percent since the start of this year. (Gulp!)
It’s laughable to suggest that Tommy Tuberville understands the stock market, or anything else (except perhaps football). Perhaps his views of the market, international politics, and DEI ought to just be ignored.
Someone needs to challenge Josh Hawley on connecting DOGE firings to remote work and the Return to Office policy. Thousands of federal public servants have been fired unrelated to their desire to RTO. Also, most have been fired unrelated to their actual job performance either.