As DOGE sputters, Elon Musk’s latest tweet storm has put a torch to the bridge between himself and President Trump.
Elon Musk has strong feelings about President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On Tuesday, he uttered an inconvenient truth, calling it a “disgusting abomination” on X. Musk noted that, far from decreasing the federal budget deficit, it will add several trillion and “burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
The White House purports to be unfazed by Musk’s heresy. “Look the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” 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.”
Musk does not arrive at the increasingly testy debate over the bill with clean hands. He is widely acknowledged to have bungled the DOGE effort to put the federal government on the fiscal equivalent of a SlimFast diet. The Economist has a new editorial simply titled, “Elon Musk’s failure in government.” It notes that his failure will ensure that future reform efforts are even more difficult to enact.
But that failure does not mean that Musk’s salty comments about Trump’s bill are misplaced. On the contrary, they form part of a growing chorus of skeptics. Take Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). In a post on X, Greene stated that she had been unaware of a specific provision in the bill that affected the ability of individual states to regulate AI:
Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years. I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there. We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous. This needs to be stripped out in the Senate. When the OBBB comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it. We should be reducing federal power and preserving state power. Not the other way around. Especially with rapidly developing AI that even the experts warn they have no idea what it may be capable of.
Another wing of Republicans, including Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY), is expressing skepticism about the bill’s budget-busting provisions. On Tuesday, Paul wrote on X, “I want to see the tax cuts made permanent, but I also want to see the $5 trillion in new debt removed from the bill. At least 4 of us in the Senate feel this way.”
Here’s the rub. Unlike Trump, who revels in his self-described title as the “king of debt,” these fiscal conservatives not only recognize but also acknowledge that the bill will compound the federal deficit. However, other senators, such as Josh Hawley (R-MO), are opposed to the Medicaid cuts that the bill already envisions. To ensure the passage of the bill, Trump can afford to lose only three senators.
With Musk publicly on the warpath, the MAGA base will be increasingly aware that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has confected a bill that will add further trillions to the deficit. Wall Street has already been warning that the bill will harm, not help, the economy. The fear is that the bond market will recoil at buying further debt and insist on higher interest rates—thereby driving debt payments even higher. This is might create a situation akin to the “Grecian formula” when Greece went belly-up in the early 2010s and had to be bailed out by the European Union (i.e., Germany).
The Trump administration is engaging in happy talk, claiming that tariffs and economic growth will take care of the problem. Don’t worry, be happy. But the financial markets don’t appear to be sold. The cold, hard truth is that at some point, the bond vultures will demand their prey. That point may come sooner rather than later.
About the Author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
Image: Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock.com.
