Elon Musk Walks Back Vow To Find $2 Trillion In Wasteful Spending / HuffPost Latest News

Musk’s boast that he could easily find the budgetary savings was never realistic. Now he’s being more modest.

By Arthur Delaney. Jan 9, 2025, 09:16 AM EST

“We’ll try for 2 trillion. I think that’s like the best-case outcome, but I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one. In terms of saving money in the government, well, as you, as you know, it’s a very target-rich environment for saving money. It’s like being in a room full of targets, like you can close your eyes and you can’t miss.” – Musk

Trump backpedaled, but only after he won the election, on lowering the price of eggs, bacon, and groceries, saying, “Gosh. Who knew that lowering groceries would be so hard.” It’s a notable retrenchment from Musk’s prior position. On the campaign trail in October, Musk said he could find “at least $2 trillion” to cut from the federal government’s annual budget of more than $6 trillion.

Untouchables

Spending Promises
Social Security Trump
Medicare Trump
Defense Trumpers1

Trump and Trumpers have nevertheless embraced Musk as a budget visionary, with Trump naming him to a nongovernment advisory panel called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Republicans then jumped on the DOGE bandwagon without realizing the name is a joke based on an internet meme about a Shiba Inu dog.

It’s hard to see how Musk’s budget-slashing vision, which is supposed to close the gap between taxes and spending, will fit with Trumper plans to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, potentially at a cost of $5 trillion over a decade, with trillions more in additional tax cuts Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Still, Musk repeated part of his prior boast that cutting federal spending is actually very easy.

  1. @RalphHightower: It used to be the Republican Party, but it died when it picked an unqualified, unfit person as their presidential candidate. ↩