Scott Bessent has shot down tech broligarch Elon Musk’s warnings that President Donald Trump’s spending proposals will add $5 trillion to the national debt.
“I admire Elon’s leadership on rockets. I will take care of the finances,” the Treasury Secretary seethed in a Fox News interview Tuesday morning, declining to respond to host Brian Kilmeade’s remarks about getting into a schoolyard brawl with the Tesla CEO earlier this year.
Bessent’s comments come after Musk reignited his otherwise simmering feud with Trump over the White House’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ on federal spending, blasting the president’s proposals in an X post on Monday.
“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country—the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” as Musk put it, adding: “Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.”
Musk, who stepped back earlier this month as chief of the Trump administration’s flagship cost-cutting DOGE initiative, later followed up with threats to back primary challenges against any GOP incumbent backing the president’s bill who had otherwise campaigned on a mandate for reducing wasteful spending.
During his Fox appearance, Bessent was quick to pour cold water on Musk’s estimated $5 trillion price tag. “I don’t agree at all,” he told the network. “This bill will set off growth like we’ve never seen before [and] once you see the growth trajectory change to an upward bias, the bill more than pays for itself. We could be in a surplus.”
He later added he anticipates Trump’s proposals, despite the deepening cracks they’ve revealed among GOP ranks, would likely pass the Senate by the end of Tuesday.
Kilmeade also pressed Bessent on Trump’s July 9th deadline for inking a slew of new trade deals with other countries. Announcing a pause to his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs earlier in April, the president claimed to have already agreed to terms with 200 nations before later conceding the real amount would likely be in the region of a few dozen. Of those, only two have yet been signed, with only eight days to go.
Bessent told the network that the administration is keen on “sequencing here,” with the president eager to sort his spending proposals before Friday ahead of turning his attention to the trade deals next week.
Adding he’d spoken with twenty-year career staffers at the Treasury and other departments, who’ve apparently told him “they can’t believe what they’re getting” from prospective trading partners, the secretary said the goal had been to “rebalance the world’s trading system,” and that “if the deal isn’t fairer for the American people, President Trump’s told us not to take it.”
Given Trump’s repeated bashing of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the past few months, whom the president has accused of mismanaging the nation’s interest rates, Fox also asked Bessent whether he’d be open to replacing Powell once the incumbent chief’s term ends next May.
“Of course, whatever the president wants me to do, it’s his decision,” Bessent said, adding he thinks he currently has “the best job in Washington,” but that he “will go where I’m needed.”
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