Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, hoping your NCAA men’s and women’s brackets are doing better than my very close to last place (okay, last place) submissions in both my Puck and family pools. Anyway, I was much more interested in the women’s swimming NCAA championships in Federal Way, Washington. Great job, Wolfpack! Tonight, as Congress is set to return to Washington after a raucous week in their districts—and while President Trump’s threats, taunts, and acts of retribution have effectively beaten much of Washington, academia, corporate America, and Big Law into submission—I explore the challenges awaiting members in the chamber. Plus, a look at the friendocracy created by Trump and Elon Musk. If you’ve read this far, and you’re still only receiving the preview version of this email, what are you waiting for? Subscribe to Puck to get full access to The Best & The Brightest, plus every other author and newsletter at Puck. You’ll know more about what’s actually happening inside the halls of Congress and around Washington than your boss (and your boss’s boss). Hit reply to this email and I’ll even send you a discount code.

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Let’s get started…

Thune’s trillion-dollar score: Senate Republicans have already started having conversations with the parliamentarian—the career, nonpartisan Senate ruleskeeper—who will eventually issue rulings on the budget framework of Trump’s tax and spending cuts. Elizabeth MacDonough, who has served in the role for more than a decade, is well-liked and much-respected by both parties. She’s also come under intense partisan heat in the past—including when she refused to let Democrats include immigration reform under reconciliation rules in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The left demanded that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fire MacDonough, or invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and overrule her. Democrats did neither, to the chagrin of liberal activists.Senate Republicans are trying to avoid similar grassroots outrage, which, of course, could be stoked at any time by an impulsive Trump tweet. I’m told by several sources that Senate Republican leadership has been in constant conversation with the White House to set expectations and discourage any pressure to ignore the parliamentarian, which would further degrade Senate norms. Let’s see if Trump listens. MacDonough will be scrutinizing, in particular, how Senate Republicans account for the cost of extending the 2017 Trump tax credits that expire at the end of the year. Senate Republicans want the extension cost to be marked as zero dollars, resetting the fiscal baseline and essentially shielding the true, multitrillion-dollar cost of institutionalizing the tax cuts. Such a move would “set a dangerous precedent” by hiding the true economic impact of policy, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which studies the ties between the economy and fiscal policy. If MacDonough rules that the tax cut extension must be scored based on current law, the 10-year extension will be priced at a whopping $4.5 trillion, making it harder for Republicans to justify tucking in other sweeteners that Trump dangled on the campaign trail, such as no tax on tips. This math would also require Republicans to come up with even deeper cuts, potentially to Medicaid, to offset all that deficit spending.
Jordan’s impeachment off-ramp: The White House continues to ramp up the pressure on Republicans to impeach judges who have ruled against his agenda, despite the lack of support on Capitol Hill for such drastic measures, as I reported last week. Speaker Mike Johnson and Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan haven’t said that they are opposed to impeaching judges, but they know it’s a fruitless and divisive crusade, given the two-third majority needed in the Senate to convict. They have, however, latched on to an alternative idea, one that was in the works before Trump called for the impeachment of a federal circuit court judge. Johnson and Jordan are promoting a bill by Rep. Darrell Issa that would prohibit federal circuits from imposing nationwide injunctions. In essence, this maneuver would strip the ability of District Court judges like James Boasberg, the judge who has attempted to block the deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, from halting administration policies. The bill, far less extreme than impeaching a judge, passed out of the Judiciary Committee earlier this month and could be brought before the full House as early as this week.

Now, for the main event…

The Johnson Trust Fall

After a 10-day recess filled with the hue and cry of angry voters, Democrats are returning to a Washington where universities, law firms, and major corporations have all been muzzled. Meanwhile, Republicans are quietly navigating their own DOGE dilemmas… including how to slice trillions of dollars from the government without too many people noticing.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

This week, members of Congress will return to a very different Washington than the one they left just 10 days ago. While they were in recess, Donald Trump started dismantling the Education Department; called for the impeachment of a federal judge; negotiated a questionable first step toward a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine; and threatened to sanction any law firms that participate in legal actions against his administration. Republicans will likely ignore all of that, and get to work on finding a compromise budget framework—which will eventually include tax cuts and spending cuts—that is agreeable to both House and Senate Republicans, a process that could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Democrats, for their part, will be under enormous pressure to figure out how to respond to any and all of it. I’ve spent the recess week making phone calls and taking meetings on Capitol Hill to get a sense of where things stand at this precarious moment. Here are the four topics keeping everyone up at night.

I. “Running Scared”

Two months into his second term, Trump is making his mandate blindingly obvious: Obey, or face the consequences. This time around, the corporate pillars of the resistance era are mostly choosing the former. Paul Weiss, the major law firm whose leadership worked against Trump during his first term—and whose chairman, Brad Karp, is a longtime Democratic fundraiser—committed to $40 million of pro bono work on behalf of the administration and the president’s priorities. Columbia University, which has been engulfed in a veritable civil war for a year, caved to Trump’s demands to crack down on protesters, ban masks, and place departments including Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies into “academic receivership.” Meanwhile, the major tech firms that were so vocal when Trump implemented his so-called “Muslim ban,” in 2017, aren’t saying anything at all about the administration’s new policies for detaining travelers for minor visa violations or about the expanded travel ban that will soon go into effect. Democrats tell me they’ve been hearing from lawyers, corporate employees, law firms, and constituents, alike, about the fear of retaliation from Trump—and why people aren’t doing more to stand up to him. Law firms are “running scared,” said one attorney with a background in Democratic politics. “They’re being extremely careful about cases they take on, they are carefully checking conflicts of interests in cases and being extremely cautious about the people they hire,” the lawyer said.

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Another lobbyist told me that their clients are afraid to speak out against Trump’s policies—even the economic ones that they think are damaging—because they don’t want to find themselves on the receiving end of a Trump-inspired boycott or MAGA onslaught online. “Everybody is scared,” the lobbyist told me, insisting that the “chilling effect is silence, not compliance.” Put another way, this new era of self-censorship is a sort of Trump-inspired cancel culture, only it’s not emanating from Twitter mobs or restive workplaces—it’s coming from the White House. Indeed, it’s not unlike the tactics that Trump has used with Republican candidates, threatening primaries or outright endorsements of challengers to cow members of his party into submission. Republicans admit as much privately, although Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who continues to brush off Trump’s threats, recently berated her colleagues for being such wimps. Rep. Thomas Massie, who defied Trump and refused to vote for his budget framework and government funding, is another of the few who haven’t stood down, despite Trump’s Truth Social post promising to “lead the charge” in primarying the popular Kentucky congressman next year.

II. Friends With Benefits

Meanwhile, Republicans are still acclimating themselves to the new political order imposed by Elon Musk, the semi-non-official DOGE administrator and “special government employee” imbued by Trump with extraordinary privileges to audit and deconstruct the federal bureaucracy. The goal of cutting red tape and slimming the administrative state has been hailed by Republicans, and even by a few Democrats. But the way in which Musk has gone about downsizing—essentially, blindly turning off funding and waiting to see what breaks, or which constituencies shriek loudest—has created a dynamic in which personal relationships with Musk, and proximity to the White House, are the primary avenues through which favored programs might be spared. Or at least that’s the perception in this relationship-based business. Some Hill Republicans have been hustling to find a line into Musk and DOGE in order to respond when proposed cuts threaten their own constituents. Of course, Democrats are completely out of luck, but even Republicans, especially those who aren’t particularly close to Trump, and have never even met Musk, are struggling to register complaints or request a review, I’m told. Some members have tried to reach DOGE through the Office of Legislative Affairs, the traditional way for members of Congress to communicate with an administration, but they’re told by O.L.A. that they don’t have much access to DOGE, either. When Musk visited Capitol Hill earlier this month to meet with freaked-out G.O.P. senators, he gave them his number and told them to call if they had questions, according to The New York Times. Musk also told them he’d set up a direct line for them to reach DOGE. Alas, that line hasn’t been set up, I’m told, further elevating the value of personal relationships with Musk or with Trump. Until recently, the favor-trading that greases the wheels of government appropriations used to happen in Congress, between legislators. Now, with the White House having seized many of those powers, the traditional give-and-take of Capitol Hill has been replaced by a sort of patronage regime. The friendocracy has been a mixed bag for Musk, himself. His favorability is now underwater, according to multiple polls, and sinking almost as fast as the stock price of Tesla. Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to halt $3 billion of funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure would severely cripple the growing EV industry (and Tesla’s encroaching competitors) without damaging Tesla, which already has an expansive charging system that the Biden administration, in part, helped to underwrite. The New York Times is reporting that Musk is well-positioned to receive billions of dollars of government contracts with multiple government agencies, leaving good-governance watchdogs—as well as Musk’s competitors—crying foul. The amount of control Musk has amassed and the frustration of those left out of the parlor game—including congressional Republicans, the ones who actually have to face constituents—is baffling for many. But Republicans refuse to say much about it publicly.

III. The Johnson Trust Fall

House Republicans are nearing a critical inflection point in passing their agenda, and rank-and-file members are girding themselves for a fight. Based on my conversations with Republicans, it seems both sides of the ideological spectrum on the right don’t have a lot of trust in Johnson, and that trust deficit grows with every major vote they take. They believe Johnson tells them what they want to hear in the moment to get past the next crisis, but he doesn’t always keep his word, since he can’t do opposite things at the same time.

For instance, in order to pass the budget framework and set up the process to pass Trump’s tax and spending cut priorities, Johnson promised centrist Republicans, whose districts have large numbers of Medicaid recipients, that benefits wouldn’t be cut. But these Republicans are nervous that Johnson will give in to the budget hawk hardliners, who are hellbent on cutting as much as possible, including deep cuts to Medicaid. And yet the hardliners, who reluctantly went ahead with Johnson’s budget framework plan because they were told that they’d get as much as $2 trillion in spending cuts, are also distrustful of the speaker. In their minds, he has gone against his word and reversed course in the past, including on issues like passing funding bills with Democrats. Republicans repeatedly tell me they’re astonished that Johnson is still speaker of the House. The long hours he’s put into building a relationship with Trump have clearly paid off. As long as Trump has his back, he’ll continue to skate by.

IV. Democratic Diligence

Democrats are coming back from recess to a party that’s even more broken and disorganized than it was merely 10 days ago. Some have seen outright anger from constituents, a taste of what Republicans are seeing in their town halls (hello, Rep. Harriet Hageman), who are demanding that the party fight harder against Trump. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer canceled the in-person part of his book tour for Antisemitism in America, and pivoted his media appearances into an explanation tour on his inability to get something from Trump in the government funding debacle. It’s unclear how much the issue will be discussed among members in the coming days, including at the Democrats’ weekly lunch this week. But what they will focus on is how they can find something to latch on to that will be popular with voters. Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education could be a major inflection point, especially if children start to lose access to resources and programs. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders invited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, raising speculation that Sanders is passing the progressive torch to the 35-year-old from the Bronx. Although Ocasio-Cortez didn’t win a race inside the caucus—which, admittedly, raises questions about her role in the party—for now, it seems that she has plenty of options.

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