US Politics
Elon Musk turns on Trump and blasts ‘outrageous, pork-filled’ spending bill
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Elon Musk appears to have turned on President Donald Trump by blasting his “big beautiful bill” as an “outrageous, pork-filled, disgusting abomination.”
The denunciation comes just days after the tech mogul exited the White House.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk posted on X Tuesday. “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
He added: “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America (sic) citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
The billionaire took a significantly stronger tone than his previous criticism of the spending bill now that he has left Washington, D.C. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Musk’s post during her Tuesday briefing.
“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill, it doesn’t change the president’s opinion,” Leavitt said. “This is one big beautiful bill and he’s sticking to it.”
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The bill, which will add a whopping $3.8 trillion to the country’s debt over the next 10 years, is currently being debated in the Senate as Trump is railing against Republican senators who have criticized it.
Musk previously said the bill “undermines” the Department of Government Efficiency – which he led to help trim the federal budget. Musk has since left that role and last week was thanked by Trump in an Oval Office event.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn’t decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said over the weekend.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
Musk’s time at the White House was limited to 130 days as a special government employee. That period expired last week. During his time in government, Tesla stock dropped as much as 71 percent. The president appeared eager to end the mogul’s time in government on a high.
“We’ll remember you as we announce billions of dollars of extra waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said Friday. “DOGE has installed geniuses with an engineering mindset and unbelievably talented people on computers,” he continued. “I actually asked Elon one time, ‘What’s their primary thing?’ And they have a lot of primary things all having to do with being smart.”
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The bill looks to slash taxes and increase spending on oil drilling, the military and border security, while also making cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs.
It proposes $1.5 trillion worth of spending cuts to unlock $4.5 billion worth of tax cuts. If Republicans fail to find $2 trillion worth of savings, the amount of money left for tax cuts would be reduced by the difference between $2 trillion and the final number of spending cuts.
Preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would increase benefits for those earning the highest through an extension of the 2017 GOP tax plan.
“The changes would not be evenly distributed among households,” the agency estimates. “In general, resources would decrease for households in the lowest decile (tenth) of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the highest decile.”
