Billionaire Elon Musk blasted the Republican spending bill, the signature legislation of President Donald Trump’s first year back in office, in a post on X on Tuesday.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote. “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’s criticism of another spending bill in December nearly led to a government shutdown.
The legislation would extend the president’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as temporarily eliminate taxes on tips and overtime work. (Another Trump campaign promise, to eliminate taxes on Social Security, did not make it into the bill.) To offset the cost, the bill cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, particularly from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 7.6 million Americans would lose health care coverage from the Medicare cuts alone. But those cuts wouldn’t fully offset the tax cuts’ cost; the CBO projects the current bill will increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over 10 years.
That last data point seems to be Musk’s main point of contention. “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit,” he wrote in a follow-up post, “and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” Indeed, the combination of the GOP bill and Trump’s sweeping tariffs has spooked bond markets, with yields for 30-year Treasury bonds hovering near 5%.
The Tesla CEO just ended his tenure at DOGE without coming anywhere near the $1 trillion or more in savings that he promised to find. Republicans in Congress have been reluctant to codify the cuts DOGE has made into law. But Musk’s words still carry weight, however, not only because he spent hundreds of millions on Trump’s re-election, but also because his criticism of another spending bill in December almost single-handedly derailed House Republicans’ support for a bipartisan funding deal, and nearly led to a government shutdown. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has already made it through the House — albeit on a narrow 215-214 vote. It’s currently with the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune is pushing to get the bill to Trump’s desk by July 4. The bill will have to go back to the House with the Senate’s changes, and that vote promises to be another squeaker. Even before then, Trump and Thune will have to navigate various senators’ objections to the House bill. Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, like Musk, have blasted the bill’s price tag. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, on the other hand, has criticized the cuts to Medicaid. In the MAGA-era Republican Party, fealty to Trump almost always wins out in the end. But as Thune recently acknowledged, there are “a lot of moving parts” for meeting the president’s July 4 target date — and Musk has thrown another spanner into the works.
James Downie is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily.
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