Dems Said They Want To Work With Musk. Doge Is Making That Hard.

Fresh off an electoral rout, some Democrats pledged to work with Elon Musk on his mission to reduce waste and fraud. Two months later — as the tech billionaire tears apart the federal government with alarming speed — those same Democrats are starting to sound far less eager.

Back in December, Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, compared Musk with the men Franklin D. Roosevelt hired to help the country mobilize for a world war. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) likened him to a Marvel superhero. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Musk could “count her in” on the Department of Government Efficiency's plans to cut waste at the Pentagon.

But that willingness to join forces has quickly morphed into horror as Musk has effectively shuttered agencies, pushed for tens of thousands of federal workers to resign, threatened others with layoffs and ground certain government functions to halt.

By mid-February, Democrats were losing some patience.

“If Musk wants to cut spending, I've sent him a list of 30 items where he could start, and I'm still open to working with him on those,” Warren told POLITICO. “But I am not open to helping him violate the law to shut down government functions that have been authorized by Congress and signed by the president.”

Khanna took to the Musk-owned X to suggest that the entrepreneur was launching “unconstitutional” attacks on American institutions — a comment that prompted Musk to reply: “don’t be a dick.”

And even Fetterman, who said he still supports Musk’s original vision, expressed alarm at the way Musk was diving into sensitive personal data. Fetterman posted a POLITICO headline on X about Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency gaining access to private taxpayer data. He wrote: “I want to save billions of your money and make our government more efficient. Rummaging through your personal shit is *not* that.”

In an interview, Fetterman urged Musk to “slow down, just a little … because you are going to hit nerves that we don't want to cut.”

Democrats are engaged in a deep soul search about how to move forward after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress last November. Their resistance movement against Trump himself is muted. But there has been some attempt torally around Musk as a boogeyman and cast him as an unelected dictator carelessly upending long-standing government entities.

Many Democrats have said any cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security would be a third rail and that DOGE could inadvertently impact payments from those programs if they move too quickly. A top staffer for the Social Security Administration resigned over DOGE’s attempts to access sensitive records.

Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who sits in a Trump-won district in rural Maine, made a rare comment on X that his office was receiving an onslaught of phone calls from constituents worried about Musk. He expressed concern Musk could threaten payments from social safety net programs in a previous interview with POLITICO.

"If you're a red-district Dem, we've gotten to the place with voters where no Democrat should be closing the door" on seeking out bipartisan issues, said Jason Bresler, a Democratic strategist. "But once you start touching things like entitlement programs, it'd be political suicide for a Democrat to touch that."

In a joint interview Tuesday night with Sean Hannity, Musk and Trump displayed affection for each other and suggested that attacks on Musk had not driven a wedge between them. It's a relationship Democrats hope will damage Republicans at the ballot box.

"He gets it done," Trump said of Musk on Hannity. "He’s a leader."