President-elect Trump and Elon Musk are finding a wellspring of unexpected cooperation from Democrats in their plans to crack down on government waste and inefficiency.

• Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an outside group that won't be part of the government, has been a mostly Republican brainstorm. But centrist and progressive Democrats have begun offering ideas for it.

💡 Rather than mocking DOGE, more than half a dozen House Democrats told Axios' Andrew Solender they have their own ideas about how it could save the federal government money.

• Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the lone Democrat to join Congress' new DOGE caucus, said his big idea is to shrink the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, perhaps by removing FEMA and the Secret Service from its umbrella.
• Progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) offered several ideas: cutting agency redundancies, consolidating export promotion agencies and instituting self-populating tax forms, as well as the more liberal idea of scrapping fossil fuel subsidies,

🗄️ "It's not a particular department across the board," Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said. "It's the way individuals interact with government — there are so many inefficiencies, so many layers."

🎯 Between the lines: These lawmakers skew younger and male. Some have open ambitions about running for higher office.

• They're seeking to answer Republicans' newfound alliance with tech billionaires by changing the perception of Democrats as unquestioning champions of bureaucracy.

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Meta and Amazon are each donating $1 million to President-elect Trump's inauguration fund, as major tech companies aim for a fresh start with him.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, both are meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, following Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dinner there last month.

Why it matters: Big Tech has long been a target for Trump, "who has lambasted the industry as biased and anticompetitive and targeted some of the biggest tech companies with threats of punitive action," notes The Washington Post, owned by Bezos.

📱Salesforce CEO and cofounder Marc Benioff, who owns TIME, tweeted congratulations yesterday to Trump on being named the magazine's Person of the Year: "We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone. May G-d bless the United States of America. ❤️🇺🇸 #Leadership #FutureOfAmerica."

• Amazon will stream Trump's inauguration on Prime Video, as it did for President Biden — a separate in-kind donation valued at another $1 million.

🏛️ Trump has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders to his inauguration 38 days from now — an unorthodox move that would fold U.S. allies and adversaries into a very American political tradition, AP reports.

• Without saying who besides Xi he has invited, Trump said yesterday during an appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, where he rang the bell to open trading: "Some people said, 'Wow, that's a little risky, isn't it?' ... And I said, 'Maybe it is. We'll see. We'll see what happens.' But we like to take little chances."

China-watchers expect Xi to decline the invitation as too risky.

• But the overture "sheds light on the president-elect's confidence and ambition as he wields power ahead of his second term," CNN notes.

💡 Worthy of your time ... "The Stock Market and TV: Trump's Most Durable Guardrails," by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman (gift link):

"Trump's fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington."

Egg prices now rival gas prices as the first place people look to get a sense of how far their dollar will take them, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

• Eggs became a poster child for inflation in 2022, when bird flu severely reduced supplies. Prices are still high now — and it's still mostly because of bird flu.

🍳 By the numbers: Egg prices rose to $3.65 per dozen in November, up 8% from October and up 71% year-on-year — but below the record high of $4.82, set in January 2023.

🛒 What's next: Trump was noncommittal in his TIME magazine interview when asked about bringing down grocery prices.

• "I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will [come down]," he said.

Transcript of Trump's interview.

The Iranian navy appears to be conducting the first sea trials for a new ship designed to serve as a launching pad for drones.

• Satellite images from space-tech company Maxar show the newly completed ship anchored in the Persian Gulf. It left the shipyard just last month.

🚢 The vessel was originally a commercial container ship, which was then modified with a ramp and angled flight deck, among other changes, so it could be used to launch and recover drones, according to Maxar.

• Talker: Drones over N.J.

The days of saving money by cutting the cord are over, Axios' Tim Baysinger writes.

• The first waves of Americans' exodus from cable to streaming was driven, in part, by the promise of a much lower monthly bill. But that gap is narrowing, if not closing.

📺 YouTube TV will raise prices by $10 a month starting in January, bringing it up to $82.99. That cost is roughly in line with a traditional cable package, per industry trade group CTAM.

• Steady price increases have become the norm for just about every major streaming service.

🏈 How it works: Cable is expensive largely because carrying live sports is expensive. As streamers compete to offer live sports as a way to attract new customers, their programming costs have gone up, too.

🛋️ Reality check: Customers get an enormous quantity of content for their streaming dollar. Netflix alone had 18,000+ shows and movies available globally last year, and there are more live sports available than ever before.

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Kids' flu vaccinations are down significantly across the U.S., Axios' Alex Fitzpatrick reports from new CDC data.

• Roughly 37% of kids nationwide have their flu shots for the 2024-25 season so far — down about 7 percentage points from the same time last year.
• About 54% of kids got their flu shot by the end of the last flu season, down from 62% the year before.

😷 Why it matters: Flu shots appear to be getting swept up in a broader wave of post-COVID vaccine skepticism.

• The CDC reported 200 pediatric flu-related deaths in the 2023-24 season — a record high for a non-pandemic flu year.

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will make her Broadway debut tomorrow night with a walk-on role in the hit jukebox musical "& Juliet," Axios D.C.'s Mimi Montgomery reports.

• The intrigue: In Jackson's memoir, "Lovely One," she recounts writing in her Harvard application essay that she wanted to become "the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage."

🎭 It's happening. The creators of "& Juliet" — a quirky reimagining of "Romeo and Juliet," complete with covers of pop songs like the Britney classic "Oops! I Did It Again" — wrote a special ensemble part just for Jackson, 54.

• She'll perform just once — during tomorrow's 8 p.m. Tickets are sold out.

"& Juliet" trailer.

The Geminid meteor shower — which NASA calls one of the "best meteor showers of the year" — is expected to peak tonight and tomorrow, Axios' Kelly Tyko reports.

• Roughly 120 meteors can be seen per hour under perfect conditions, according to NASA.

🔭 What to watch: The Geminids are bright and fast meteors and tend to appear yellow or green.

• Your best bet to see the shower will be after 10 p.m., with the peak coming shortly after midnight in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

NASA recommends getting far away from city lights and lying flat on your back with your toes pointing southeast. Let your eyes adjust to the dark for about 30 minutes.

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