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Salon
Salon
Politics
Cheyenne McNeill

Musk calls spending bill "disgusting"

Just days after leaving his post in Donald Trump's administration, Elon Musk said that he isn't too happy about the president's favored spending bill. 

"I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore," Musk wrote in a post to X on Tuesday. "This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it."

As head of the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, the tech billionaire wielded a literal chainsaw while orchestrating massive federal layoffs to cut costs. Less than a week after leaving the post, Musk lashed out at GOP legislators for racking up debt via the "One Big Beautiful Bill."

 "It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt," he wrote.

According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would reduce federal funding for SNAP and Medicaid by over $800 billion over the next decade while increasing the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion.


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This isn’t the first time Musk has expressed his dissatisfaction with the bill. In an interview with CBS News last week, Musk said he was “disappointed” in the spending bill, which passed the House by a vote of 215-214.

"I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful," Musk said, "but I don't know if it can be both."

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Musk’s criticism of the bill doesn’t change Trump’s opinion.

"The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill," she said.

The bill has yet to pass the Senate, but one senior White House official told NPR it would be an “all-out advocacy effort” to get the bill through the upper chamber.

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