Elon Musk has spent the past two days tweeting incessantly about the massive budget bill passed in the U.S. House and is currently being worked on in the Senate. The bill is a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest Americans and will take away health care from about 11 million people. So why doesn’t Musk like it? The billionaire oligarch doesn’t think it cuts deep enough.
“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL,” Musk tweeted Wednesday.
The legislation, dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill by President Donald Trump, is projected to leave 10.9 million people without health insurance by 2034, cut $3.75 trillion in taxes, and add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. And it’s that last part that Musk says he’s worried about.
“A new spending bill should be drafted that doesn’t massively grow the deficit and increase the debt ceiling by 5 TRILLION DOLLARS,” Musk wrote.
The Tesla CEO wants the entire bill scrapped and for lawmakers to start over before it ever passes the Senate and eventually gets signed into law by Trump. House Republicans were hopeful the Senate would get it passed with minimal changes before July 4 so that Trump could sign it by Independence Day. But that’s considered a wildly optimistic timeline. Whatever happens, a budget bill needs to pass by August, when the U.S. Treasury expects the debt limit would be reached, throwing the government into default.
There are, of course, two ways to close a budget deficit if that’s something that’s vitally important to you: You can either raise taxes or cut spending. And you’re never going to believe which one wealthy guys like Musk prefer. Well, you can probably believe it because the billionaire has, until recently, been in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency invented to decimate the federal government.
DOGE was responsible for killing all kinds of programs, and unlawfully abolishing USAID in its entirety, with the initial goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending. But the billionaire has ostensibly stepped away from his work at DOGE after cutting about $150 billion, even if he still has minions scurrying around at virtually every agency, according to new reporting from Wired. Only a fraction of that number is publicly verifiable.
Musk hinted at his displeasure with the budget bill over the weekend in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, telling David Pogue that a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but it can’t be both. But it wasn’t until Tuesday that the gloves really came off.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” Musk wrote.
For their part, Democrats have been less than useless in pushing back against Musk’s calls for deeper cuts. “I didn’t think it was imaginable but… I AGREE WITH ELON MUSK,” Schumer tweeted. What part did Schumer agree with? That’s not entirely clear. But Schumer is also the guy who helped Trump get his last big budget bill passed to avoid a government shutdown, handing the president literally everything he wanted. The Senate minority leader talks a big game like he’s opposed to Trump, but he’s arguably one of fascism’s great enablers.
Brian Kilmeade of Fox News said during Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning that he heard Trump was “furious” with Musk over the criticism, but doesn’t want to speak out publicly about it. Trump shared a post to Truth Social on Wednesday that was simply a screenshot of an old Musk tweet thanking the president. The Musk tweet is from May 28, several days before Musk started panning the bill in such blunt terms.
It appears that Musk believes drastic action should be taken to remedy this situation with the budget bill. The billionaire quote-tweeted a question from Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah asking if he’d support a new amendment that would mean anytime there’s a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all members of Congress would be ineligible for re-election. The idea comes from an old video of Warren Buffett back in 2011. Musk wrote, “100, this is the way.”
Musk is clearly frustrated by his time in Washington. He’s always wanted to be the hero who can be credited with coming in to save the day. But the billionaire’s brand has been forever tarnished by his escapades with the Trump regime, most notably when he decided to make two Nazi-style salutes on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s second inauguration. And his attempts to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” were a bust, instead making Musk the king of cutting whatever he wanted rather than exposing waste.
One member of DOGE who went to work at the Department of Veterans Affairs said he was shocked to find no fraud, a sentiment that got him fired from Musk’s team. That person, Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia, told PBS that he wasn’t actually sure who was in charge at DOGE.
At the end of the day, most people don’t like what Musk did in the government. Polling back in April showed just 35% of Americans didn’t approve of the oligarch. And it seems like a safe bet that it would’ve been even lower on Musk’s “last” day in the White House, even though Trump said he’s not actually leaving.
Whatever happens with the Big Beautiful Bill, you can bet that Trump is going to keep trying illegal methods to get what he wants. The White House asked Congress on Tuesday to claw back $9.4 billion in funding already allocated, mirroring what DOGE has already illegally cut in a more permanent fashion. The process is known as recission and the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, has argued the president wouldn’t even need to get a vote to do it, according to the Associated Press.
Some Democrats have pointed out that’s illegal, but Vought looks at it a different way, claiming any time there’s tension between Congress and the executive branch, that just needs to be litigated.
“We’re not breaking the law,” Vought insisted to CNN on Sunday. “Every part of the federal government, each branch, has to look at the Constitution themselves and uphold it, and there’s tension between the branches.”