Tesla (TSLA-3.33%) CEO Elon Musk swiped at the large Republican domestic policy bill making its way through Congress, in a notable break from President Donald Trump.
In an excerpt of a new CBS interview released late Tuesday, Musk expressed dismay over the sizable price tag of the legislation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over a decade. Musk argued it would undercut the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he spearheaded to slash the federal workforce and hollow out government agencies.
“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,” he said.
“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful. But I don’t know if it could be both.” Musk added, referring to Trump’s frequent description of the legislation as “big” and “beautiful.”
Asked for comment, the White House pointed to an X post from Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top policy advisers. Miller defended the legislation and said it would achieve Republican goals to provide tax cuts, boost domestic energy production, and curb illegal immigration. Separate legislation would be needed to write DOGE’s cuts into law, he said.
Musk’s remarks are the latest break between the president and the world’s richest person. The Tesla executive has said he lobbied Trump to either lower or get rid of the tariffs now in effect on most foreign imports. He has stepped back from his role leading DOGE to focus more on his companies, which include SpaceX and X.
Earlier this year, Musk said DOGE would yield $2 trillion in savings from its drive to root out inefficiencies and government waste. But it hasn’t reached anywhere close to that amount: DOGE says it has saved $160 billion for taxpayers so far, but numerous reports have cast doubt on even the savings it claims to have achieve. The CBO recently reported that the federal government increased spending by $166 billion from January to April.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Musk said in a Washington Post interview published Tuesday. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
House Republicans last week passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” without Democratic support after months of turbulent intraparty negotiations and sent it to the Senate.
The bill would renew a suite of tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year, including a set of research and investment-related tax deductions for businesses. Border enforcement provisions are wrapped into the bill as well. It is partly paid for by eliminating clean energy tax credits and social safety net cuts.
It still faces significant hurdles in the upper chamber from conservatives seeking deeper spending cuts and other senators wary of phasing out clean energy tax credits or enacting changes to Medicaid that would cause poor Americans to lose their health coverage.
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