Days after his exit from his role in the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk is once again throwing his weight around, this time to oppose the president’s embattled “big, beautiful bill.” On X, Musk excoriated the spending bill, calling it “the debt slavery bill” that “contains the largest increase in the debt ceiling in U.S. History.”
“Call your Senator. … Call your Congressman. … Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL,” Musk posted on Wednesday. The next day, he took to X to lob more incendiary accusations at President Donald Trump after the president repeatedly attacked Musk and his businesses on Truth Social.
Drama aside, the mercurial billionaire’s concerns are perfectly justified. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “disgusting abomination” of a bill, in Musk’s words, would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit and would indeed raise the debt ceiling to unprecedented levels. Interest payments on the national debt, even without the bill’s massive spending increases, have surpassed total defense spending as a percentage of GDP, and spikes in treasury yields last month sent a clear message that the federal government’s trajectory on spending is utterly unsustainable.
“The U.S. federal government’s on an unsustainable fiscal path,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said. “And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s at all controversial.”
Musk’s concerns over the “digital surveillance state” carved into the bill should terrify anyone who values privacy and individual liberty. The Fortune 500 company and frequent CIA contractor Palantir is set to create “ImmigrationOS,” a mass data aggregation platform that will collect information from the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services databases.
Members of Congress on the Left and Right and in the center have ample reason to kill or, at the very least, dramatically alter the spending bill. But the Trump administration has made it clear that it is unwavering in its support of the worst budget-buster since the COVID-19 lockdowns.
“Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it.”
The bill passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, 215-214, with Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) voting “present.” All House Democrats voted against the bill, and it is reasonable to assume all Senate Democrats will follow suit. The GOP can only afford to lose three Republican votes in the Senate to keep Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaking vote in play, and as of now, at least four senators have voiced strong opposition to the bill.
MUSK SAYS TRUMP WOULD HAVE LOST ELECTION WITHOUT HIM AMID PUBLIC DISPUTE
Despite frequent attacks and threats from Trump, fiscal hawk Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is opposing the bill due to its grave economic impacts. Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rick Scott (R-FL) both voiced opposition on the grounds of the bill’s massive increase to the national debt. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called the bill “grotesque” and “fiscally irresponsible.” Johnson claimed the bill would not pass the Senate without substantive changes.
Perhaps Trump can put enough pressure on one or more of these senators to ram the bill through without major overhauls, but not if the world’s richest man has something to say about it. President Calvin Coolidge said, “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” Musk is right: Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is bad, and it deserves to die.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.