There’s an old Washington saying that we’ll sanitize here since this isn’t the LBJ presidential library. It is better to have someone inside the tent urinating outward than outside the tent urinating inward.
Elon Musk seems ready to illustrate this adage yet again while testing exactly how big a tent the Republican Party of 2025 really is. Mere days after departing as a special government employee running the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has said the White House-backed, House-passed “Big, Beautiful Bill” is actually a “disgusting abomination.”
The former DOGE chief hadn’t exactly hidden his feelings about the Republican reconciliation package while working for President Donald Trump. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk told CBS News in his waning days at the White House, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
But the post-DOGE volley seemed like an escalation. It comes as fiscal hawks in the Senate stand ready to pick the bill apart and individual Republican lawmakers in the House are starting to find new faults after voting for it. It passed the lower chamber by a narrow 215-214 margin.
Prior to stepping down, Musk was the primary representative of small-government conservatism in the Trump White House. He is something of a convert to techno-libertarianism and now displays the appropriate zeal.
Trump himself has never really run as much of a government-cutter, though he has made overtures to voters who are. He has pledged to protect the biggest entitlement programs from cuts. Many of his other campaign promises involve the effective use of government power. Policies championed by many of his allies, both inside and outside of the administration, would require at least partially moving on from the Goldwater-Reagan approach to the size and scope of government.
Yet at the same time, the Trump economic policy as described by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is a fusion of supply-side and economic nationalism. As Pat Buchanan advised in 1996, “Marry the growth agenda of Ronald Reagan to the America First philosophy of the four men whose faces are carved on Mount Rushmore — and the future is ours.”
To do that, Trump needs his tax cuts renewed. The big, beautiful bill is a vehicle to do that. But to get it through a House where Republicans now rely on blue-state lawmakers for their majority, concessions had to be made on the SALT deduction caps compared to the original 2017 tax cuts.
Trump has also added novelties like no taxes on tips or overtime which have the potential to expand the constituency for tax cuts in a way consistent with the Republican Party’s more working-class base. This is no longer just a debate over the top marginal income tax rate, which Bill Clinton largely won, not long after George H.W. Bush of “read my lips” fame abandoned ship.
But the SALT compromise and the new tax cuts are revenue losers that lack a strong supply-side rationale. That might not be a problem if it weren’t for growing budget deficits and spiking Treasury bond yields.
A rare thing late-period Dick Cheney seemed to get right was his observation that “deficits don’t matter,” at least not politically. Bush 41 paid an electoral price for letting them (and taxes) increase as about a third of his coalition abandoned him in his 1992 reelection bid, and Clinton reaped a windfall for reducing the deficit and eventually balancing the budget alongside a Republican Congress.
But there has now been a budget deficit every year for almost a quarter century and it has been above $1 trillion since fiscal year 2020. Musk’s complaint is that there is no improvement on that horizon. “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 said before departing the White House.
Musk appears to still get along well with Trump himself, despite some mutual disillusionment about the DOGE process. But his recent protests could embolden fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate, such as Kentucky Republicans Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie.
Even Musk hinges his criticism of current deficit spending on pork-barrel projects and waste, DOGE’s ostensible top targets, rather than the biggest long-term drivers of the debt. His public skepticism comes after the House’s passage of the bill, whatever its merits, demonstrated a noticeable improvement in Trump’s ability to herd elephants on Capitol Hill compared to the first term.
Now Trump must rescue his tax cuts from deficits that arose from decades of political leaders in both parties urinating down our legs while pretending it is raining.
Read the full article here
