UPDATE (May 28, 2025, 10:26 a.m. ET): Elon Musk posted to X on Wednesday night, saying that while his "scheduled time as a Special Government Employee" has ended, "The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government."
As billionaire Elon Musk more or less retreats from Washington, his latest media tour is well underway. In a clip released Tuesday night from an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” he criticized House Republicans’ recently passed megabill to fund President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“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 said from SpaceX’s Texas launch site. He added: “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.”
Musk likewise vented to The Washington Post about how unfairly he was treated in his few months in Washington:
“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 said repercussions over DOGE cuts had been severe. “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.”
Musk does have plenty of reason to be salty about his time in government. The GOP megabill — actually called the Big Beautiful Bill Act — has its share of large spending cuts, mostly to offset tax cuts for the wealthy. But it almost entirely ignores DOGE’s efforts. Politico reported Wednesday that the White House is only just now preparing to send a roughly $9 billion rescission request to the Hill. That’s only a fraction of the cuts DOGE has made — which in turn are only a fraction of the promised $2 trillion in savings Musk would usher in — and is itself a tacit admission that he couldn’t legally make these cuts unilaterally.
Musk does have plenty of reason to be salty about his time in government.
Meanwhile, many of DOGE’s biggest changes find themselves tied up or even reversed for now in court. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a massive lawsuit claiming Musk and DOGE’s efforts are likely unconstitutional could proceed. And politically, Democrats have used Musk as the poster child for Trump’s unlawfulness, buoyed by the Tesla CEO’s clumsy efforts to use his fortune to sway elections.
There’s also the matter of how the GOP’s bill might affect Tesla. Though SpaceX’s government contracts continue to grow, the electric vehicle company is still Musk’s bread and butter. The House-passed legislation rolls back many of the Biden-era clean energy programs, including the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles. Musk said he was in favor of nixing the credit last year, explaining it would help Tesla over its competitors — but that was before the plunge in sales that has accompanied his increased political footprint.
While Musk told the Post that he wasn’t entirely done with DOGE, he’s committed to refocusing his efforts on his companies over government work. When it comes to SpaceX, his big goal for Tuesday’s launch was one “where hopefully things don’t explode. The last few times it exploded. This is a very real concern. Big rockets, don’t explode: Goal. I mean, there’s so much energy in the rocket, it desperately wants to explode at any given point in time.”
For the record: It did not explode — but it did spin wildly out of control and fail to land in one piece. Metaphors are funny like that.
