Musk may presage GOP fiscal blowback
Elon Musk said he was disappointed to see the massive spending bill increases the budget deficit and "undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." Credit: AP/Evan Vucci
By itself, the statement by Elon Musk that he’s "disappointed" in President Donald Trump’s massive budget bill headed for the Senate has little practical effect. Musk’s governmental clout, after all, derives from Trump.
But he may encourage GOP lawmakers who said similar things before and after the measure cleared the House last week and was en route to the Senate. "I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Musk told CBS last weekend.
Musk recently stepped away from Trump’s ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency, attending to his corporate electric car and spaceship ventures.
Some DOGE actions were slammed as counterproductive, mistaken and legally dubious, with their claimed taxpayer savings overstated. Only if and when DOGE’s efforts are scrutinized from outside the administration will the true results be documented.
DOGE aside, charges of overspending resound for the moment inside the Republican Party. Major credit rating agencies have been downgrading U.S. bond issues, citing rising debt and out-of-balance budgets.
Sen. Rand Paul has long been a maverick in the GOP caucus, a role sometimes parallel to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic camp.
Paul told Fox News Sunday: "I think the cuts currently in the [budget] bill are wimpy and anemic, but I still would support the bill even with wimpy and anemic cuts if they weren’t going to explode the debt."
"The math doesn’t add up," said Paul, of Kentucky. "There’s got to be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong and deficits are wrong and wants to go in the other direction." Allies may include Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who warned that Trump should "get serious" about spending and deficits.
In his first term, Trump dismissed such cautions. In fact, it impressed even critics of his 2016 populist campaign that Trump ditched years of discussions within the GOP about the urgency to reduce spending on such entitlements as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
While spending was shielded, deep tax cuts mostly for corporations and the wealthy were enacted, expanding projected deficits. Then emergency spending on COVID-19 grew, followed by President Joe Biden’s ambitious New Deal-ish infrastructure bill. But to pay for it, Biden never negotiated even a single point increase in the corporate tax rate that was cut dramatically under Trump.
Have the fiscal hawks returned to the nest? The "waste, fraud and abuse" cliché has been around a long time, but a common definition of the scourge is difficult. Medicaid and SNAP eligibility changes are in the bill, but hawkish or not, even Trump adviser Steve Bannon warns, "You got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid."
Alongside an array of reductions in Trump’s comically branded "big beautiful bill," there is an increase in planned Defense Department spending, currently at more than $800 billion per year, usually estimated at 13% of total federal spending.
For decades, it has been a poorly kept military secret that Pentagon spending generally gets minimal scrutiny. Musk and his team belong nowhere near the defense budget since his SpaceX company has major contracts. Defense spending has been a bipartisan sacred cow.
With Republicans at odds on fiscal philosophy, and Democrats bent on resistance, the Senate returns Monday to Washington. Even with a 53-47 Republican majority, the process ahead could prove rough going if fiscal hawks are as serious as they sound.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
