Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, has expressed in a new interview his disappointment in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which the United States House of Representatives approved last week.
Jeff Cox reported Wednesday at CNBC regarding Musk’s interview:
In an interview to be aired June 1 on ‘“’CBS Sunday Morning,’ the richest person in the world and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency advisory board said the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will not help the nation’s finances.
‘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 said in a clip the program shared on social media platform X.
DOGE says it has saved $170 billion in taxpayer money since it began in January, targeting areas of government waste and redundancy in sometimes-controversial ways.
Unfortunately for advocates of reducing US government spending, this situation is what I suggested would arise in my April 4 article “The DOGE Switcheroo.” In the article, I noted that, despite DOGE efforts at cost cutting, “the trajectory of US government size and power will continue upward and onward.” This is due in part, I noted, to the fact that “Congress has, with President Donald Trump’s strong support, kept spending on autopilot based on the course established in the previous presidential administration.”
Three months earlier, in my article “Downsized DOGE,” I had suggested that Musk, who had already reduced his goal for DOGE derived government spending reductions from two trillion to one trillion dollars annually, may, in a year, have given up on asserting DOGE would reduce overall spending and have instead settled for just “talking about how DOGE can limit the increasing of US government spending.” That situation came to pass in less than half a year.
As far as cutting overall government spending goes, DOGE appears to have failed.
