Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought pushed back Sunday against Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency commission, stating that the Big Beautiful Bill will not increase deficit spending or affect the growth of the national debt.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Vought was shown a video of Musk criticizing the bill and asked by Dana Bash if it undermines DOGE’s efforts.
“I love Elon,” Vought replied. “This bill doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt. In fact, it lowers [the deficit] by $1.4 trillion.
“What some of the watchdogs have done,” he added, “is they have used [the Congressional Budget Office’s] artificial baseline, which doesn’t allow and assume that current tax law will be extended because of sunsets that are in the law.
“They don’t do that with spending. It is totally something that would be foreign to any common sense person who comes and looks at how we budget in this country. And so when you when you assume the extension of the president’s tax relief from 2017, this budget or this bill, and it really a reconciliation bill, it’s not really a budget bill … This is a $1.4 trillion over ten years deficit reduction. It’s $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings. Obviously, we have a little bit of spending in there as well for border and defense, but that is the biggest mandatory savings package that we have seen since… 1997. It’s very historic.”
Earlier this week, Musk told “CBS Sunday Morning” he was opposed to the bill, stating, “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, which increases the budget deficits — doesn’t decrease it — and [it] undermines the work the DOGE team is doing.”
Meanwhile, also on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., pushed back on the bill. Paul told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “the math doesn’t really add up.”
“One of the things this big, beautiful bill is, is it’s a vehicle for increasing spending for the military and for the border. It’s about $320 billion in new spending. To put that in perspective, that’s more than all the DOGE cuts that we found so far. So, the increase in spending put into this bill exceeds the DOGE cuts.”
Paul added that for the border wall, the spending cost is about $6 million per mile, and with a thousand-mile wall, that figure hits at roughly $6 billion. “But they have $46 billion” for a border wall, he added. “So, they’ve increased the cost of the wall eight-fold.”
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