WASHINGTON — Elon Musk broke with President Donald Trump over the House-passed domestic policy bill, saying in an interview that he was “disappointed” that it would increase the federal deficit.
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“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in an interview that will air in full this Sunday.
Musk’s public break comes as the Republicans’ bill heads to the Senate, where several senators have also criticized the legislation for increasing the deficit. The legislative package encompasses many of Trump’s priorities, and Trump has urged Congress to send the bill to his desk for a signature “as soon as possible.”
The tech mogul’s remarks in the interview also come as he has suggested he would be backing away from his administration role to return his attention to the private sector. Musk said on X last week that he had to be “super focused” on his companies and was “back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms.”
NBC News has previously reported that special government employees, a class of temporary worker that included Musk, can typically work up until 130 days in a calendar year, though the days can be split up. The White House first publicly acknowledged Musk’s role on February 3rd, so Musk was likely nearing the end of that tenure.
Musk acknowledged the imminent end of his White House role in a Wednesday night post on X and called for the “DOGE mission” to become “a way of life throughout the government.”
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” he wrote.
Musk, a Trump ally and top White House figure, has also distanced himself from Trump over his tariff policies. Musk, whose automaker, Tesla, has parts made in North America, China and Europe, has called for a “zero-tariff situation” between Europe and the U.S. and positioned himself as an advocate of “free trade and lower tariffs.”
In the “Sunday Morning” interview, Musk threw cold water on the title of the bill, which is officially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, after Trump’s description of it.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk said, laughing. “My personal opinion.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Trump weighed in on Musk’s comments when he was asked by a reporter Wednesday.
“We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,” Trump said. “That’s the way they go. It’s very big. It’s the big, beautiful bill.”
The president said that “we have to get a lot of votes,” adding that “we can’t be cutting,” although he did not go into details.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., shared the clip of Musk’s comments on X, saying Musk “is right.” He pointed to the bill’s impact on increasing the deficit, adding that “there’s nothing beautiful about that.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., referred to DOGE’s efforts in a post to X, praising Musk and DOGE as having done “INCREDIBLE work exposing waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government.”
“The House made sure to build on DOGE’s success within the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Johnson said in the post, which noted that the House would work to pass a rescissions package to codify DOGE cuts.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., also weighed in, saying she was informed that “we are going to see the first DOGE cuts bill on Monday.”
“As a country, we cannot survive our national debt and honestly, we may be past the point of return,” Greene said in the post. “We should be aggressively attacking our debt and aggressively, cutting all waste fraud, and abuse and unnecessary programs.”
The Department of Government Efficiency initiative, spearheaded by Musk, has slashed the size of the federal workforce, cut government programs and killed contracts with the express goal of saving federal money. But DOGE efforts have led to a flurry of lawsuits, and critics argue the cuts and layoffs have hurt vital programs and instigated chaos.
At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the tax cuts and spending in the bill would add $2.3 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years, which is a sticking point for conservative fiscal hawks.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., likened outsize spending to “mortgaging our children’s future,” saying Sunday in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he believed there were “enough” Republicans to “stop the process” to make changes to the bill.
Paul said on “Fox News Sunday” that he would have voted for the bill even if the spending cuts were “wimpy and anemic” except for the fact that the legislation would “explode the debt.”
GOP senators will also have to contend with a faction of their caucus that has expressed concerns over certain cuts to programs like Medicaid. The House-passed bill is expected to rescind health care for about 8.6 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though Johnson has argued that the cuts were “working in the elements of fraud, waste and abuse.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., urged his colleagues in an op-ed in The New York Times this month to avoid Medicaid cuts.
“If Republicans want to be a working-class party — if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,” Hawley wrote in the op-ed, which was published before the House passed the bill.
Any changes made to the bill in the Senate would also have to be passed by the House. The bill passed the House on a razor-thin margin of 215-214 votes, largely along party lines.
