Elon Musk, the Republican megadonor who spent President Donald Trump’s first few months in office clumsily disassembling whatever federal agencies he deemed too woke, poured a lot of money into the 2026 midterms—at least $474 million, according to The New York Times. Voters, however, were less enthusiastic about maintaining the status quo: Democrats are currently projected to win 259 House seats and at least 54 seats in the Senate. As an investor, even if you are capable of comfortably dropping half a billion dollars on an election, this is not the return for which you hope.
Among many other things, Tuesday’s results mean that for the first time, Musk could soon face meaningful consequences for some of his actions. And although there are plenty of viable grounds for investigating Musk, there’s no better place for Democrats to start than with the wreckage left behind by the “Department of Government Efficiency,” the Musk-led initiative that slashed hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, wasted billions of dollars in public resources, and by one estimate led to the preventable deaths of half a million children.
Musk officially left the administration in May 2025. But for the next two years, Democratic lawmakers must use their newfound power to hold him accountable for the things he did—not just to people, but to the very concept of representative democracy. DOGE took power that the Constitution delegates to the legislature and placed it in the hands of lumbering, semi-employable tech bros who cut off funding for vital programs, gutted administrative agencies that threatened Musk’s bottom line, and demonstrated a startling indifference to security and privacy along the way.
This is not just about politics. It is the work of enforcing the law against people who break it. The next time a reactionary billionaire contemplates hijacking the federal government in order to cosplay as a pro-innovation, anti-bureaucracy technocrat, they need to understand that doing so will come with a price.
Under the Constitution, Congress has the implied power to conduct “oversight” of the executive branch, which allows it to investigate to ensure that the laws Congress passes are being enforced. Using these oversight powers, lawmakers can do things like hold public hearings, call witnesses, obtain documents, take sworn testimony, and publish findings. The work of conducting these investigations falls to individual House and Senate committees. And if a person does not wish to participate in the process—for a guy like Musk, a pretty good bet—committees can also issue subpoenas in order to compel compliance.
To date, Republicans have had little interest in doing any of these things, and instead have used their majorities in both chambers to protect Musk. In June of last year, for example, House Democrats tried to subpoena Musk during a committee hearing in which they happened to outnumber the Republicans in attendance. In response, the presiding Republican, South Carolina’s Nancy Mace, simply suspended the hearing until her colleagues could wrangle enough Republicans to defeat the motion.
Already, though, Democrats have made clear their intent to use Congress’s oversight powers when the new Congress convenes in January. “The American people have a right to know the cost, the consequences, and the chaos resulting from DOGE,” said Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, late last month. “There is a web of potential corruption here that needs to be explored.”
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.
