The moral panic currently sweeping through the ranks of the American political class—most notably among Democrats in Congress—concerns the fact that Elon Musk is unelected and is meddling with the work of other people in government who are also unelected. We are, apparently, supposed to share that concern. The great horror of our time, we are told, is that this man, a billionaire with the gall to be inquisitive, has taken it upon himself to examine the workings of the American state. And yet, if the primary concern of these statesmen is the illegitimacy of unelected power, one wonders where their outrage has been for the thousands of unelected federal bureaucrats who wield vastly more authority over American life than Musk ever could. The common refrain that “Washington gets nothing done” is a myth. Washington, through its executive agencies, imposes scores of new regulations every year. It is Congress that gets nothing done. But Washington never stops.
One does not have to be a disciple of Musk to observe that the objections against him are absurd on their face. For the past several decades, executive branch agencies have functioned as an unaccountable shadow government, issuing between 3,000 and 4,500 new regulations per year, each with the force of law. These are rules that dictate how businesses must operate, how individuals must live, and how entire industries must be reshaped. Yet, no one ever votes on them. They are the work of a bureaucratic class that answers to no one, save for the occasional congressional hearing in which our elected representatives play at oversight while continuing to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities.
And now, suddenly, Congress has rediscovered its concern for unelected authority. The hypocrisy would be laughable were it not so infuriating. The American system, as originally designed, placed Congress at the center of lawmaking. The House and Senate were meant to be deliberative bodies, charged with crafting legislation that reflected the will of the people. But that model has long since eroded, replaced by a far lazier and more cynical system. Today, Congress rarely writes laws in the traditional sense. Instead, it passes framework legislation—vague, open-ended statutes that grant executive agencies the authority to “fill in the details.” These details, it should be noted, are the actual laws that govern the country.
This shift allows Congress to avoid the burden of responsibility. Should an agency overreach, and anyone actually notice, Congress can simply feign outrage, hold a hearing, and do absolutely nothing to rein in the power it willingly surrendered. When a controversial regulation is enacted, members of Congress can shake their heads and say, “Well, we didn’t write that.” And should anyone ever question how one of these agencies spend their money, politicians pretend to care, even though they don’t, because the entire point of this exercise is to funnel money from taxpayers to political elites. Congress has, therefore, perfected the art of governing by avoidance—retaining their titles, their prestige, their committee positions, while ceding the dirty work of governance to an unelected managerial class. The result is that policy in the United States is not determined by elected officials but by a sprawling federal bureaucracy, consisting of something like 50,000 to 100,000 rulemakers who operate with no direct accountability to the public. And yet, we are now meant to believe that the true scandal is that Elon Musk, the one person to come along and shed light on these agencies, is also unelected?
It is difficult to overstate just how fraudulent modern congressional “oversight” has become. Members of Congress no longer seem particularly interested in governing. Their real job is to perpetuate their own careers—to gerrymander their districts, to amass war chests of donor money, to appear on television denouncing the latest manufactured outrage of the day. The average congressman spends far more time fundraising than writing legislation. And so, when Musk appears as an interloper in this system—when he buys a social media platform and releases damning internal documents showing government agencies pressuring companies to suppress speech—Congress reacts not with curiosity, not with concern, but with fury. How dare he pull back the curtain? How dare he scrutinize the workings of the unelected state?
The political class does not fear Musk because of his wealth, or his eccentricities, or his businesses. They fear him because he is exposing the machinery of unaccountable governance. These are the same people, it must be noted, who only months ago erupted in outrage when the Supreme Court ruled that federal agencies should not have unchecked power. The decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo struck down the old Chevron doctrine that had allowed bureaucrats to interpret vague congressional statutes however they pleased, effectively letting agencies—not lawmakers—decide what the law means. The ruling did nothing more than return power to Congress, but Congress did not want it back. The same people who are now hand-wringing about Musk being unelected were just yesterday furious that the courts had made it harder for unelected bureaucrats to regulate unchecked. The inconsistency is stunning, but also completely predictable.
The outrage over Musk’s involvement in public affairs is particularly revealing because it inadvertently raises the very question our ruling class wants to avoid: Who actually governs America? The Constitution would have us believe that Congress is the primary lawmaking body, but that is no longer the case. The sheer volume of rules created by executive agencies far exceeds the number of laws passed by Congress. And unlike Congress, these agencies do not answer to the people. Their employees cannot be voted out. Their rule-making process is largely invisible. They are, for all intents and purposes, a fourth branch of government, supreme to all the rest, operating outside the bounds of democratic control.
The selective outrage is almost impressive in its brazenness. For decades, the American people have been governed by an unelected class, shielded from scrutiny, protected by political indifference. The reaction to Musk’s intervention is revealing, not because of what it says about Musk, but because of what it says about the people we do elect, a class of politicians who, if they were truly so concerned about unelected power and preserving our democracy, would not have spent half a century undermining our democracy by outsourcing their responsibilities to a bureaucracy they deliberately refuse to control and oversee.
