Elon Musk is right: America’s spending is out of control

Elon Musk rarely bites his tongue. Just ask the Treasury Secretary, who the tech billionaire branded a “Soros agent,” or the UK’s Prime Minister, who Musk accused of going soft on grooming gangs in January this year. But it seems the founder of the Department for Government Efficiency (DoGE) has been holding back a rather explosive opinion – one he could never share while he was popping in and out of the Oval Office, working for President Donald Trump.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote this afternoon on his platform X. “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.”

There it is: the biggest inconsistency of Trump’s agenda, finally said out loud by the person who can draw the most attention to it. 

Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is going to wipe out any savings made by DoGE. Worse, it’s going to make America’s deficit problem catastrophically worse, by adding an additional $2.6 trillion onto the deficit over the next decade. Trump’s decision to cut taxes much faster and more aggressively than spending. The problem is that both were pushed as options on the campaign trail during those last critical weeks. The Trump coalition – the one that led him to sweeping electoral success – was in part made up by fiscal conservatives who liked the idea of Musk taking an ax to government spending. The problem, however, is that the coalition was also composed of voters who liked Trump’s repeated promises that there would be no tradeoffs and no tough decisions along the way.

America has a debt crisis on its hands: when the bomb explodes is anyone’s guess (and lots of people are guessing). The country’s $36 trillion national debt is no longer sitting comfortably with those who would have once pointed out that the dollar is the reserve currency, or that cuts could be made if necessary. This latter point was Musk’s mission coming into government six months ago: to get federal spending under some semblance of control. 

It turns out, there is no political will for shrinking the size of government. The remit of DoGE was originally to cut $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget deficit – an attempt to somewhat rebalance America’s spending habits with the amount of revenue it actually raises. This was quickly watered down to $1 trillion, as it became increasingly clear that there was no appetite among Team Trump to make cuts in controversial areas, including Social Security, Medicare or defense. 

Musk left his position as a contractor last Friday – with a friendly press conference in the Oval Office – having delivered around $150 billion worth of cuts so far. Promising he’d still be involved, Musk insisted that DoGE would get to the one-trillion mark: “The DoGE influence will only grow stronger,” he said. “I’m confident that over time, we’ll see $1 trillion of savings, and a reduction in $1 trillion of waste, fraud reduction.”

Days later, the Dark MAGA campaigner seems to be suggesting he might be stumping in the midterms next year to reverse that Republican wave, sharing on X “in November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.” It’s certainly a change of tune. But don’t expect any change in the trajectory of government spending or debt. With Musk gone, DoGE on the rocks and the congressional bill moving through the Senate, both are set to keep growing.