Elon Musk Whines That Trump Is Hanging Him Out to Dry
Donald Trump’s biggest 2024 donor isn’t too stoked about the administration’s spending habits.
Weeks after exiting his temporary role in the White House, Elon Musk is still speaking his mind on critical Republican affairs. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the former government-diminishing task rabbit lamented that the “big, beautiful” bill being deliberated in the Senate would practically undo the Department of Government Efficiency’s work.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit—not decrease[s] it—and undermines the work the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said. “I think a bill could be big, or it could be beautiful—I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
Musk’s DOGE was tasked with sizing down the federal government to cut spending. But in a separate interview Tuesday, the world’s richest man said he increasingly felt that his department was being used as a scapegoat for other administration failures.
“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk told The Washington Post. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
But Musk isn’t the only powerful conservative to brush off Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill. Immediately after the House passed the reconciliation package last week, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham shot down some of the cuts included in the bill as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.
Even a $880 billion cut in Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.
Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.
On Sunday, Johnson told CNN that he believes there’s enough opposition within the caucus to stall its advancement.
“We have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Johnson told the network.
America’s national debt is currently more than $36.9 trillion, as of the time of publishing.