Elon Musk raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package, saying in a video released Tuesday that he believes it would raise the US budget deficit and undercut efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency.
“I 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,” the tech billionaire and Trump donor told “CBS Sunday Morning.” “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a big boost to the US military and to national security spending – largely paid for by overhauls to federal health and nutrition programs and cuts to energy programs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would pile another $3.8 trillion to the deficit. It narrowly passed the House last week, and now heads to the Senate, where it will likely face many changes.
Musk’s comments come amid a media tour ahead of a SpaceX test flight Tuesday evening. Musk is stepping away from full-time government work to focus on his companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, which have struggled in part as a result of Musk’s alliance with the Trump administration.
He noted the move in an interview with Ars Technica on Tuesday, hours before SpaceX’s Starship test flight.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics, it’s less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media,” he said when asked whether he feels his focus on politics over the past year has “harmed” SpaceX. “It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”
Musk also noted last week that he’ll spend “a lot less” money on politics in the future, but it’s still not clear whether the remarks signal any change in his pledge to commit $100 million into political groups controlled by the president. Musk previously spent more than $290 million to help get Trump and GOP congressional candidates elected in November. Musk-linked groups also shelled out more than $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year that his preferred candidate ultimately lost.
Musk also continued to defend the work DOGE has been doing in Washington, telling the Washington Post on Tuesday that the team has become a “whipping boy.”
“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
CNN has previously reported that DOGE is poised to continue its work even as Musk steps back, with staffers to remain in place, embedded across federal agencies, for months or years to come.
CNN’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.
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