Sure enough, while votes were still being counted on Tuesday, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden hinted that subpoenas would be forthcoming in the not-so-distant future. The incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, California Democrat Robert Garcia, framed the stakes in much more practical terms for members of the extended MAGA universe: “LAWYER UP,” he wrote on X, Musk’s own social-media platform.
Under federal law, defying a congressional subpoena is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and up to a year in prison. (In 2022, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress after stonewalling the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot.) Congress can also enforce a subpoena by seeking a federal court order, which, if granted, subjects a subpoena recipient to the possibility of being held in contempt of court. Finally, if neither criminal nor civil enforcement does the trick, Congress has an “inherent” contempt power that involves deputizing the Sergeant at Arms to literally arrest a recalcitrant party and jail them until they cooperate.
As applied to Musk, each of these enforcement mechanisms comes with unfortunate caveats. The task of prosecuting him for criminal contempt would fall not to Congress, but instead to a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney. Given that the Justice Department now functions as a taxpayer-funded law firm that defends the interests of the president and his allies, I don’t expect that a federal prosecutor assigned to this case would take it especially seriously. Trump has also floated the possibility of issuing a preemptive pardon to Musk. This would not affect Congress’s ability to conduct an investigation, but would protect Musk from the specter of federal criminal prosecution based on its findings—and, depending on how broadly Trump phrases such a pardon, from criminal consequences associated with dodging a subpoena, too.
Options outside the criminal legal system also have practical drawbacks. Civil litigation takes time, and Musk would have every incentive to drag out the process and hope that Democrats lose interest—or, better yet for him, control of Congress in 2028. Meanwhile, the last time a chamber invoked its inherent contempt power was nearly a century ago, which means that as cool as it would be to watch, Capitol Police officers are unlikely to perp-walk Musk through National Statuary Hall anytime soon.
All that said, neither Musk’s cooperation nor his physical presence is strictly necessary for Democrats to have an impact. They can, for example, hold hearings featuring career civil servants whose jobs disappeared overnight because one of the president’s largest donors decided that their agencies should never have existed in the first place. They can take testimony from subject-matter experts who can quantify the real-world harms that DOGE has already inflicted, and will inflict in the years to come. They can elevate the voices of everyday people whose lives were ruined by random twentysomethings who spent months ping-ponging around the federal government, running agency after agency into the ground.
Ideally, of course, Democrats end up getting Musk on camera and under oath. But their oversight powers also allow them to try Musk in absentia in the court of public opinion—essentially, to run a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will make it too costly, both financially and reputationally, to attempt an amoral stunt like this in the future.
In the days since the election, Democrats have already started debating what they should do next; given the volume of horrors perpetrated by the Trump administration thus far, there is no shortage of worthy contenders. But in an interview on MS NOW on Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries broadly downplayed the importance of imposing consequences on those responsible. Voters, he asserted, do not want Democrats to “get even,” but instead to “get things done on their behalf.”
The premise here—that holding bad actors to account and getting things done are mutually exclusive—is a textbook false choice that, to their credit, other Democrats have been pointedly rejecting. Other than Trump, there might not be a more toxic figure in recent political history than Musk, who over the course of a weekend fed the U.S. Agency for International Development into the woodchipper—his metaphor, not mine—after reading one too many demented conspiracy theories on X. Many of the people who lost their jobs because of DOGE are still looking for work. One study estimated that the cuts to USAID could lead to 14 million additional deaths by the end of the decade. Ensuring that Musk faces consequences for these choices is not “getting even.” It is governing.
The voters who rejected Trump and his movement on Tuesday did their jobs. It is time for Democrats to do theirs: to find out exactly what DOGE did, to punish people who broke the law, and to prevent it from happening again.
