Democrats gathered outside the Treasury Department Tuesday to protest Elon Musk’s and DOGE’s access to the department’s payment system–and they did not hold back.
Lawmakers speaking outside the Treasury Department included Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Rhode Island Rep. Seth Magaziner, and Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who called Musk a “Nazi nepo baby.”
“What we’re not going to do is stand around while they pull this bullshit that they’re trying to pull right now,” Crockett said, while California’s Sydney Kai Kamlager-Dove tore into “unelected unqualified billionaire” Musk “to come into our treasury to try to take control of our government to have access all of the information we use when we are trying to get a motherf---ing tax return.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In her own speech, Warren said, “No one elected Elon Musk to nothing. And yet Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people. We are here to fight back. This is no longer business as usual.”
Musk “has grabbed control of America’s payment system” in order to “collect on his investment” in Donald Trump’s election, Warren went on.
With that control, she warned, Musk could choose who does and does not receive their social security payments, with critics potentially suffering the consequences.
The highest-ranking career Treasury official resigned late last month amid pressure from Musk and DOGE employees, who had been clamoring for access to those payment systems since the election.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy alluded to those who now control the Treasury’s disbursement of some $6 trillion in annual funds.
“We don’t pledge allegiance to the billionaires” or to “the creepy 22-year-olds working for Elon,” Murphy said.
A bill is in the works aimed at preventing “unlawful access” to the Treasury’s payment systems, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Tuesday.
“Our belief is there’s a real danger, a terrible, terrible danger and a looming danger that they will not only have access to American privacy information, but that they will use that to cut programs left and right,” Schumer said.
Other comments, like from New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver, had some Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to argue that they’re calling for an “insurrection.”
“When we leave here, we need to organize and mobilize and tell people to call every elected official of Congress and let them know—especially the Republicans—that we will not take this! We will fight back!” McIver said.
“And as I close out, because I know we have been out here for a long time, and goddamnit: Shut down the Senate! We are at war. Anytime a person can pay $250 million into a campaign and then be given full access to the Department of Treasury of the United States of America, we are at war!”
Greene’s response—“This sounds like a call for insurrection to me”—echoed Musk’s reaction to seeing nonviolent protests Monday outside the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been taken over by the State Department and which Musk wants to shutter.
“Oh look, an ‘insurrection’!!! The radical left put a lot of innocent people in prison for exactly this behavior,” Musk wrote on X after Democratic members of Congress attempted to enter USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., but were blocked.
On Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin called out Musk’s false equivalency.
“In his native apartheid South Africa, that might have looked like an insurrection to him,” Raskin said, “because the authoritarians don‘t know the difference between an insurrection and a nonviolent, popular protest.”
