Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is “disappointed” in the House’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which narrowly passed in the lower chamber last week and has been sent to the Senate.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and it undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk says in a clip of a longer interview that will air this weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Musk, who was the face of the administration’s efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency, said it was his “personal opinion” that “a bill can be big or it could be beautiful,” but that he doesn’t “know if it could be both.”
Elon Musk sounds off:
— James 𝕏 (@James12KX) May 28, 2025
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill... it increases the deficit and undermines the work the DOGE team is doing.”
Then this gem:
“A bill could be big, or it could be beautiful—I don’t know if it can be both.” #ElonMusk #Dogecoin #Crypto… pic.twitter.com/ZZHOa42ZCp
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently addressed some criticisms of the bill, which he said were based on false claims.
I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.
The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to “mandatory” spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps. The senate rules prevent it from cutting “discretionary” spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.
I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit. This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.
Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars. This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t “fund” almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill “added” trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities, while enacting a net spending cut of over 1.6 TRILLION dollars.
The bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.
Musk's comments come as he's stepped back from his role helping DOGE as a special government employee, which meant he could only perform services for the government for no more than 130 days in a one-year period.
He acknowledged he didn't get as much done as he had hoped.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
Musk explained that DOGE became "the whipping boy for everything."
“So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it," he said.
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