A group of Senate Republicans on Wednesday met with Elon Musk privately and reportedly told him that he would need Congressional support and approval in order to pass his Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) agenda.

The department has been helping to audit the federal government, to cut out redundancy and wasteful spending. But Musk's allies on the hill are now saying that it won't pass court muster without Congress codifying his plans.

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul told reporters after a luncheon on Capitol Hill that he supports a lot of Musk's recent actions, but that court rulings recently proved they would need a different route to become permanent. A Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s argument that billions of dollars in foreign aid should remain frozen.

“To make it real, to make it go beyond the moment of the day, it needs to come back in the form of a rescission package,” Paul said. “I love all the stuff they’re doing, but we got to vote on it. My message to Elon was: Let’s get over the impoundment idea and let’s send it back as a rescission package."

Paul admitted that he would need 50 or 51 senators to support Musk's ideas in order to codify the actions, per The Hill.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham expressed support for voting on DOGE's proposed cuts, stating that the vote should have occurred "like, yesterday."

Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn also said they should vote on the cuts, but the proposal would not be in the next budget and would need to be done separately. 

“My understanding is, since the budget reconciliation deals with mandatory spending [and] that the DOGE cuts would be primarily from discretionary. The way we’d do that procedurally is for the White House to request us to take up a rescissions package,” Cornyn said. “We could pass it with 51 votes here and a majority in the House.”

Paul said that Musk appeared open to the idea of getting Congressional approval for his plans, but did not appear to know that he would need it.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.