Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) boss and alleged “whipping boy” Elon Musk has slammed President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” as a betrayal of his hard work.
“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,” he bluntly told CBS News in an interview that was previewed Tuesday.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion,” he added.
Listen:
“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful. But I don’t know if it could be both.”
Tech billionaire Elon Musk tells CBS Sunday Morning’s @Pogue he was “disappointed” to see the Trump-backed “big beautiful” spending bill, which passed in the House last week.
Musk said… pic.twitter.com/LUcuTaNYrs
— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) May 28, 2025
In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Musk bemoaned his inability to bring change to Washington, D.C.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
He went on to complain about becoming the world’s “whipping boy.”
“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it. People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
With his role in the Trump administration slowly winding down — but not being eliminated — Musk has been spending much more time on his companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
BREAKING: Elon Musk watching the Starship 9 test flight from the control center. pic.twitter.com/eldff8EdMX
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) May 27, 2025
In remarks made to Ars Technica, he pondered whether he’d spent too much time on politics this past year to begin with.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” he lamented. “It’s less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media.”
“It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks,” he added.
With that said, at the time of the interviews, he was back to work in South Texas, where he was focused on the next test of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which is a key component of his mission to reach Mars.
“I’m physically here,” he told the Post. “This is the focus, and especially around launch. Everything comes together at the moment of launch.”
Starship’s ninth flight test marked a major milestone for reuse with the first flight-proven Super Heavy booster launching from Starbase, and once more returned Starship to space → https://t.co/Gufroc2kUz pic.twitter.com/RNJkj5OobP
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 28, 2025
Musk continued by describing his “maniacal sense of urgency.”
“I’m just wired that way, and that’s the kind of mindset that I’ve kind of instilled in the people at SpaceX,” he said. “You have got to drive hard, and not everyone is cut out for that.”
‘”Like, people want to have the chill vibes, and SpaceX is sort of ultra hardcore. But if we’re not ultra hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars? You’re not going to get to Mars in 40 hours a week,” he added.
All this comes amid the passage of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” in the U.S. House. The problem, critics say, is that despite DOGE having made billions of dollars worth of spending cut recommendations, congressional Republicans included none of them in the bill.
This is a huge problem because Republicans won’t have another chance this year — if ever at all — to bypass the Senate filibuster using budget reconciliation, the process they’ll be relying on to carry the “Big, Beautiful Bill” to President Trump’s office.
Meaning that if the final version of the bill doesn’t include DOGE cuts, then DOGE cuts likely won’t ever be codified into law.
No, there aren’t.
We didn’t codify a single DOGE cut, which means there were no actual cuts. And the idea that they’ll cut spending without reconciliation is laughable.
Stop dangling this carrot. It’s insulting at this point. https://t.co/8vX8eyloDy
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) May 22, 2025
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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