Elon Musk speaks alongside President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 30, 2025. Credit – Kevin Dietsch—Getty Images
Former White House adviser Elon Musk on Tuesday issued a blistering criticism of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending package, calling it a “disgusting abomination” as the Senate seeks to quickly pass the measure and send it to Trump’s desk before July 4.
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” Musk said in a post on X, the social media platform he owns. He added that the package is a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill.”
The comments marked Musk’s most public break yet with the President, and landed just days after he officially stepped down from his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory office created by Trump to identify and eliminate waste across the federal government. But it’s not the first time Musk has criticized the bill. Last month he gave cover to Republican critics, saying that the measure failed to reduce the federal deficit and undermined his DOGE efforts.
In a separate post Tuesday, Musk added that the bill would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden [American] citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” He appeared to be referencing projections from budget analysts who estimate the legislation could add more than $2.5 trillion over the next decade to the national deficit, which has grown to $1.3 trillion. “Congress is making America bankrupt,” Musk wrote.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has likewise concluded that while the bill includes cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other safety net programs, those reductions would be overwhelmed by the tax cuts and other provisions projected to increase the deficit by between $2.3 trillion and $5 trillion over the same period.
The House narrowly passed the GOP tax and spending bill last month by just one vote after weeks of tense negotiations between the White House and Republican lawmakers concerned about ballooning deficits. The package, dubbed by Trump as “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” extends his 2017 tax cuts, creates new tax breaks on tips and overtime, and raises the federal debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
Musk posted his latest criticisms as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was defending the bill to reporters during a press briefing. She quickly found herself responding to Musk’s view. “The President already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” Leavitt said. “It doesn’t change the President’s opinion.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson also pushed back on Musk’s criticism, which he called “disappointing” and “surprising.” “With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the one big, beautiful bill,” Johnson told reporters.
But Musk’s rebuke has energized fiscal hawks in the Senate who were already uneasy with the legislation’s scope. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, responded directly to Musk’s post on Tuesday: “The Senate must make this bill better.” Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, added: “I agree with Elon. We have both seen the massive waste in government spending and we know another $5 trillion in debt is a huge mistake. We can and must do better.”
In the House, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the few Republicans to vote against the measure in the House, also responded to Musk: “He’s right.”
In the upper chamber, several Senate Republicans including Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have called for deeper spending cuts before they will support the bill. If the Senate amends the legislation, it would be sent back to the House for another vote.
The bill also includes provisions that have surprised and alarmed some of the President’s staunchest allies. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, posted on X that she regretted voting for the bill after discovering a section—buried on pages 278 and 279—that she says strips states of the authority to regulate artificial intelligence for a decade. “I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights,” she wrote. “I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”
While Trump repeatedly praised Musk during his time in the Administration, reports of internal clashes and disagreements occasionally spilled into public view. Musk previously criticized Trump’s protectionist trade policies and tariffs, and his time working for the government was met with uneven results as he came up well short of his goal of slashing $2 trillion from the federal budget.
Write to Nik Popli at nik.popli@time.com.
