“We have to get a lot of votes”: Trump brushes off Elon Musk’s disappointment over the ‘Big Beautiful Tax Bill’
US President Donald Trump dismissed Elon Musk's criticism of his tax bill, stating compromises were necessary for votes.
President Donald Trump dismissed criticism from billionaire adviser Elon Musk over the cost of his landmark tax bill, insisting that strategic compromises were crucial to ensure it passed. “Number one, we have to get a lot of votes,” Trump told reporters on Wednesay. “We can’t be cutting — you know, we need, we need to get a lot of support.”
Elon Musk, who led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut federal waste, expressed disappointment during a CBS News interview. He said he 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.” His concerns reflect growing unease among fiscal conservatives, who argue that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—which fuses sweeping tax cuts with boosts to military and border budgets—might balloon the national deficit.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk said.
Though the bill squeaked through the House, it is expected to face substantial edits before getting enough Republican support in the Senate. Trump acknowledged there were elements he wasn’t satisfied with, but he emphasized the tax cuts made it worthwhile. “We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,” he said. “That’s the way they go.” He later added the legislation’s value lies in “the level of tax cutting that we’re going to be doing.”
Musk, in a separate Washington Post interview, said DOGE had become an easy target for political blame. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he remarked at the Starbase launch site in Texas before SpaceX’s Tuesday mission. “Whenever something goes wrong anywhere, we get blamed even if we have nothing to do with it.”
He further criticized Washington’s inefficiency: “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized. I knew there were problems, but trying to improve things in D.C. is definitely an uphill battle, to say the least.”
Sources:
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/28/trump-brushes-aside-elon-musks-criticisms-of-his-signature-budget-bill
- politico.com/news/2025/05/27/elon-musk-slams-trump-tax-plan-deficit-00161235
- washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/26/musk-trump-doge-bureaucracy-comments
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