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After spending months lying to the American public on behalf of the Trump administration, billionaire Elon Musk is now performing distress over Republicans passing deficit-increasing tax breaks for the ultra wealthy.
In an interview with CBS News at the headquarters of SpaceX, Musk said that he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion,” Musk said, referencing how Trump — and thus the Republican Party —has been calling the policy package the “big, beautiful bill.”
Trump and the GOP’s massive reconciliation package — which will make permanent the president’s 2017 tax giveaway to America’s wealthiest households — is expected to raise the federal deficit by up to $4 trillion. Musk, who played an active role in the first months of Trump’s administration as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has returned his attention to his companies after widespread public backlash to his in-government antics.
When tapped to lead DOGE, Musk promised that the organization would cut federal spending by “at least” $2 trillion. In reality, the over-empowered initiative has likely cost taxpayers at least $135 billion through its chaotic firing-and-rehiring of federal workers, according to an analysis by the Partnership for Public Service. The analysis did not include the added costs of litigation related to DOGE’s work, the impact of disruptions to federal programs, and the potential loss of tax revenue stemming from DOGE’s firings at the IRS.
In a separate interview with The Washington Post, Musk added that he felt DOGE became “the whipping boy for everything.”
“Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it,” he added, without providing a specific example.
While DOGE and Musk are definitely not responsible for all of the chaos and mismanagement that has defined the first months of Trump’s second administration, they had a hand in much of it. Musk spoke at Cabinet meetings as if he were a fully fledged agency head despite only holding a temporary employee status at the White House. DOGE destroyed or gutted entire agencies — including the United States Agency for International Development — fired tens of thousands of federal workers with little notice, and attempted to gain access to all manner of sensitive government data systems. The pseudo-agency’s teardown of the federal government has not been popular with Americans, and Republicans faced so much backlash at town hall events that the party advised lawmakers to stop holding them.
House Republicans are now facing backlash at town halls over the tax bill, though. Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) was booed lustily on Tuesday night as he tried and failed to defend his support of the bill, which in addition to raising the deficit is expected to kick millions of Americans off Medicaid. Flood admitted to his constituents that he hadn’t even read the bill before voting for it.
