Libertarian Populism Killed the Spending Bill

(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

As a bipartisan continuing resolution spending bill loomed before Congress this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X Wednesday, “I had hoped to see Speaker Johnson grow a spine, but this bill full of pork shows he is a weak, weak man. The debt will continue to grow. Ultimately the dollar will fail. Democrats are clueless and Big Gov Republicans are complicit.”

“A sad day for America,” Paul added.

Elected in 2010, Paul has seen this familiar tactic too many times, pushing deeply flawed and damaging legislation through at the last minute with both parties to blame.

Wednesday night, the bill was killed.

Though Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is a Donald Trump ally, had crafted this bipartisan stopgap measure, other Trump allies—prominently, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Sens. Paul and Mike Lee (R-UT) along with Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY), among others—came out against the bill, whipping up resistance on social media and the broader right.

It was a 1,500 page–plus measure released mere days before the deadline, so few could actually read it. Ramaswamy called it “full of excessive spending, special interest giveaways and pork barrel politics.” In other words, typical Washington.

Under Democrat presidents like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, passing this bill would have been business as usual unless a Republican majority could muster a stink, usually to no result. The same would have gone under a hypothetical Republican President Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush. Hell, Biden technically still is president, but the gravitational political pull right now is in the direction of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is an unconventional leader, to say the least.

And it was largely Team Trump that stopped this bill.

In opposing it, Ramswamy added, “We’re grateful for DOGE’s warm reception on Capitol Hill. Nearly everyone agrees we need a smaller & more streamlined federal government, but actions speak louder than words.”

“This is an early test,” Vivek said. “The bill should fail.”

Ramaswamy clearly sees the bill’s fate as an indication of how seriously congressional members will take DOGE, the upcoming Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by him and Musk.

Musk has said he wants $2 trillion in cuts in federal spending, which sounds like a libertarian dream. He has already shown interest in Paul’s annual “Festivus” list of wasteful government spending, born of the fake holiday from the television show Seinfeld. Rand’s father, former congressman and libertarian icon Ron Paul, has been sought by Musk as a DOGE advisor. Libertarian-leaning Republican Rep. Thomas Massie recently accepted Ramaswamy’s offer to help with DOGE. Vivek said of meeting Massie, “It was the next closest thing to love at first sight!”

On Thursday, Paul suggested that Musk replace Mike Johnson as House Speaker.

This limited government, fiscally restrained spirit, so integral to traditional American conservatism, seems to be a guiding force on the eve of Trump’s second term.

The moment is by no means perfect. Trump has already said that he wants to raise the debt ceiling, something Democrats have long clamored for.

But it is a libertarian populism that now animates the impending DOGE and that helped kill the terrible Johnson spending bill. The establishments of both parties are accustomed to getting their way, particularly on spending.

This time, they didn’t.

One consensus that seemed to emerge from the presidential election is that a populist victory was inevitable, but it was only Republicans who delivered it.

Some progressives lamented that Democrats put forth a clumsy and empty establishmentarian choice in Kamala Harris, as opposed to a Bernie Sanders-flavored candidate who might have appealed to the working class.

Republicans saw, once more, that Trump’s “America First” brand not only still dominated and defined their party, but was the right fit for a majority of Americans in this time.

There are different forms of populism. The left-leaning Occupy Wall Street and right-leaning Tea Party movements of the late aughts often had the same targets, but different prescriptions. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2016 and 2020 Democratic campaigns promised widespread, safety net socialism, while Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign seemed to be primarily about upending a broken system.

How broken systems get upended can come in different forms.

On Wednesday, it was libertarian.