NEED TO KNOW
- Elon Musk is expressing his disappointment in President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping budget plan that was narrowly passed by the House on May 22.
- The tech billionaire told CBS Sunday Morning that the megabill would add to the national deficit and undo his recent work with the Department of Government Efficiency.
- Musk openly opposing Trump’s agenda comes after he vowed to start spending less time in the White House and more time with his companies.
Elon Musk isn’t thrilled with President Donald Trump’s new budget plan.
The tech billionaire and White House adviser has headed up the Department of Government Efficiency since the start of Trump’s second term, working to make major cuts to areas of the government the administration deems unnecessary.
After already taking an ax to federal agencies and programs in recent months, Musk now feels that DOGE’s work could soon be undercut by Trump’s sweeping budget legislation — titled the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — that passed in the House of Representatives on May 22.
“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 told CBS Sunday Morning in an interview that will air in full on June 1.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is funding its tax cuts and military spending in part by cutting some federal health and energy programs. However, it is also poised to add an estimated $3.8 trillion to the national deficit, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk said.
His latest comments against Trump’s agenda come as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO plans to take a major step back from his White House work.
In early April, multiple sources claimed that the president had informed his inner circle that Musk would be shifting into a “supporting role” at the White House and returning to his business ventures.
Politico also reported on April 2 that some White House insiders “increasingly view [Musk] as a political liability.”
In a Fox & Friends interview on April 3, Vice President J.D. Vance indicated that those reports may have been overblown, saying Musk will continue to be part of a “long and committed effort” to undo the “vast bureaucracy that thwarts the will of the American people.”
“DOGE has got a lot of work to do, and yeah, that work is going to continue after Elon leaves,” Vance said. “But fundamentally, Elon is going to remain a friend and an adviser of both me and the president.”
“The work of DOGE is not even close to done,” the VP added. “He’s done a lot of good things.”
Musk, however, told The Washington Post on Tuesday, May 27, that he felt his DOGE project was taking a lion’s share of the blame for unrelated problems in the Trump administration.
“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.”
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Musk added. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
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A week before speaking to the Post, Musk pledged to spend “a lot less” money on politics in the future. He also admitted to Ars Technica on Tuesday that he “probably did spend a bit too much time on politics” and not enough on his duties with Tesla and SpaceX.
“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 ahead of a failed test flight for SpaceX’s Starship. “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.”
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