Over the weekend, businessman Elon Musk expressed his disappointment with the Trump-backed domestic policy bill narrowly approved by the House of Representatives last week.

“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 in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

As CBS reports, while the bill is still awaiting Senate approval, the bill “would extend Mr. Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, boost border security spending, impose work requirements on Medicaid and roll back clean energy tax credits.”

Needless to say, that’s a lot to accomplish in a single bill. The combination of positive features, including rolling back green energy tax credits and and modest Medicaid reforms, gives cover to the fact that this is a deficit-buster of a bill.

According to the Budget Lab at Yale University, the bill, as written, “would add $3.4 trillion to the debt over the 2025-2034 window and $15.3 trillion from 2025-2055.”

But these figures grow even greater if certain temporary provisions of the bill are later made permanent — which is a tendency for politically popular provisions — “the cost over the 2025-2034 window is $5.0 trillion and over the 2025-2055 window is $23.7 trillion.”

Any savings from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are effectively wiped out by this blend of special interest tax breaks and spending.

But the president has gone all-in on pushing the “big beautiful bill” because it contains essentially all of his domestic policy goals in one large package.

“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it can be both.”

While Musk has understandably rubbed many the wrong way with his often combative style, he’s certainly correct about this.

“In a lot of ways, the Big Beautiful Bill is simply the latest version of an intra-Republican debate that’s been ongoing for decades: Is fiscal responsibility a talking point or a serious policy goal?” argues Reason Magazine’s Eric Boehm.“The specifics change, but when push comes to shove, the GOP has consistently (though not always) chosen spending increases and tax cuts, even when those proposals will make the budget deficit worse and add to the national debt.”

There’s really no debating that point. In President Trump’s first term, even amid an economic boom and before the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government was on track to see $1.5 trillion deficits through the decade.

“Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,” he said at the time.

Now, despite the mirage of DOGE, it looks like that’s still his approach. Only now he’s pursuing a policy of massive tax increases through tariffs to ostensibly offset some of these rising deficits.

There’s really no winning.

— From Tribune News Service