The tech mogul is urging followers to pressure lawmakers to “KILL THE BILL,” potentially undermining a key plank of President Trump’s domestic agenda.
Can Musk kill the budget bill?
Elon Musk hasn’t stopped criticizing the budget bill that he has called a “disgusting abomination.” In fact, he appears to be just getting started.
The debate in Washington now is how far Musk will go to try to defeat a bill that — by the assessment of Musk, several Republicans and now nonpartisan watchdogs — will vastly add to the federal debt.
“KILL THE BILL,” Musk posted on X on Wednesday, a message he urged followers to press with members of Congress. He has turned a majority of his feed into a stream of reposts of content criticizing the legislation and denouncing its effect on the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.
A string of assessments suggest that the bill will add to the debt. The most consequential, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated that the House version of the plan would add $2.4 trillion over the next decade, given both the roughly $3.8 trillion tax cut at its core and additional spending. (Other estimates are even higher, including the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s: $2.8 trillion.)
A Republican counter: Attack the messenger. The Trump administration advanced hard-to-believe claims about C.B.O. staff members’ partisanship, and arguments that its analysis ignores projected economic growth.
That said, a previous nonpartisan analysis of the House bill found that the tax cuts would generate nearly no additional economic growth, and even conservatives found the budget office’s analysis credible. “When all the models are in unison,” Erica York, the vice president for federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told The Times, “it really doesn’t make sense to triple down on the strategy to blame the scorekeeper.”