The abomination squad

How Elon Musk learned to start worrying and hate the GOP budget bill

Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch

Last week Elon Musk was done with politics and leaving Washington to spend more time with his anxious corporate boards. But impulse control is, like, so out right now, and Musk is back, going nuclear on the the big bill carrying the GOP’s tax cuts, Medicaid and food aid cuts, and Trump’s bid to debilitate the judiciary.

Musk is cloaking his criticism in concern for the bill’s exploding deficits and irresponsible spending. It just happens to coincide with a multi-dimensional post-DOGE blow-up with the White House over protection for Musk’s interest from EV credits to Starlink. The man paid $280 million to get this whole party started, after all.

More on Elon in a moment. When he popped off, the Senate was getting ready to start work on the already-precarious budget reconciliation bill. So this is a good time for a quick guide on what to watch for amid all the misdirection in the reconciliation process.

GOP divisions — This is by far the most important principle at play. The reconciliation bill passed by one single vote in the GOP-controlled House, after weeks of bitter standoffs between Freedom Caucus hardliners, California and New York Republicans in districts Biden won, and others. Other MAGA members are just now finding that they voted for stuff their constituents hate, and pledging to bail if those provisions aren’t taken out. But now the Senate is definitely going to make changes. Keep in mind that whatever passes there has to go back to the House to pass again before it goes to Trump’s desk. It’s true Republicans in general are highly motivated to pass Trump’s tax cut and give him a legislative win. It’s also true Speaker Mike Johnson had a very tough time getting the bill passed in the first place…and many GOP’s who grudgingly voted yes the first time are going to hate what comes back on the rebound. Republicans want to deliver for Trump, but recent history also teaches that those who underestimate the House GOP’s capacity for chaos and dysfunction are leaving money on the table.

Medicaid — The last time Republicans tried to used the reconciliation process to leverage a governing trifecta was in 2017. It failed with spectacular drama when Sen. John McCain and two other Republicans voted down Trump’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After years of GOP neglect—and often hostility—to Medicaid, several Republicans’ unwillingness to gut the program was what ultimately drove defeat. Today there’s a group of four Senate Republicans publicly criticizing Medicaid cuts that go too deep. The House bill cuts roughly $600 billion and more than 10 million beneficiaries from the program.

Trump and the White House have been lying about these cuts while they move to reduce a program vital to many of Trump’s own voters. How well that propaganda holds up could say a lot about the limits of MAGA’s appeal with poor and working class whites. Steve Bannon publicly warned Trump that “a lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, positioning himself for what he hopes is the right-wing populist future of the GOP, is also against the cuts. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are also publicly uncomfortable. If you lack faith that Collins will back up her concerns with a “no” vote, I don’t have evidence to dissuade you. But she also represents a state with a high proportion of Medicaid recipients.

Deficit numbers — Another Senate GOP faction is demanding even deeper spending cuts out of a proclaimed concern for deficits. Projections show the House bill increases the deficit by $3 trillion trillion over the next decade. The White House is lying about this too…but that hasn’t convinced Sens. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson and others who would like to see even deeper cuts to safety net and social programs working people rely on. Bond markets are also showing signs of deep discomfort with the debt (along with Trump’s impulsive tariff lurches and political instability.) Which leads us to…

Budget gimmicks — The Senate has rules and traditions governing how policies like tax cuts or social programs affect the deficit in the out years. Republicans are getting ready to break those rules, in order to pretend making Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent, while drastically increasing defense spending, doesn’t balloon the debt. Republicans are upset with congressional accountants’ reports on how their bill expands the deficit, so they’ve…you guessed it…attacked the accountants. This will be an important internal dynamic as GOP Leader John Thune and Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham try to steer reconciliation through. If you find yourself interested in the details of the budget shell came to come, try this.

Turfing the parliamentarian — The reconciliation process is only for direct spending and deficit reduction. You’re not allowed to use it for random policy preferences like, say, enabling Trump’s authoritarian campaign to ignore court rulings when he loses. The House bill has a provision doing just that: stopping federal judges from enforcing contempt citations when Trump officials ignore judicial orders. That provision, and many others, have to pass muster under the Byrd Rule. If the Senate parliamentarian rules it doesn’t deal directly with the budget, it’s out.

Naturally, that has several Republicans, including Sen. Mike Lee, attacking the parliamentarian, and calling for her to be overruled if they should lose. Majority Leader John Thune says “we’re not going there”…but I’d keep an eye on what Republicans do if and when Trump ups the public pressure to give him autocratic power.

Aggravated SALT — Right now taxpayers in high-tax states are limited in how much of their state and local taxes (SALT) they can deduct from their federal tax bill. These are blue states, and it took Mike Johnson more than a month to get Republicans in districts Biden won to agree to vote for the reconciliation bill in exchange for raising the deduction. GOP senators, meanwhile, have zero interest in the SALT deduction. They’re likely to nix it and apply the money to the deficit hole. If that happens, how do the handful of House GOP’s who went to the mat for SALT vote?

Oooopsies — As of this writing, two House GOP’s claim they hadn’t read the reconciliation bill closely enough to know what the were voting for before they pressed the “YES” button. Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’ll vote no if the Senate doesn’t remove a provision barring states from regulating AI (it might not survive the Byrd Rule anyway.) And constituents at a town hall were livid when Nebraska Rep. Mike Flood said he hadn’t read the judicial contempt provision before voting for it. Stay tuned!

Elon-term risks

All this brings us back to Elon Musk, and his attack on the bill’s deficit numbers as an “abomination.” It lights a fire under right-wing budget hawks who are using concerns over debt to demand deeper spending cuts. None of that points to the situation getting any better for Medicaid, increasing pressure on pro-Medicaid GOP’s to put up or…not. Remember, this bill passed the House by a single vote, and any Senate changes in the areas listed above make Mike Johnson’s life cumulatively harder when the bill lands back in his lap.

It will be 218 times harder still if Musk makes good on his follow-up threat to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people” by voting for the reconciliation bill. That’s literally the entire House GOP caucus, minus five people (one voted “present”, two didn’t vote at all.) Will Musk back up the threat against Republicans with primary spending against them? One of the few predictions I’ve been comfortable making is that Musk and Trump will no longer be friends by the end of the year. Maybe wait and see how many of his goodies he gets back.

More broadly, where this bill lands will say important things about where the Trump-era GOP is headed. Will Hawley and Bannon’s vision of a GOP realigned to defend the economic interests—and not solely the cultural resentments—of working class whites take root? Will Musk’s Tea Party-like gesture toward deficits while still attacking social safety set programs as a “Ponzi scheme” help keep the party firmly rooted in corporate welfare? Will Sen. Joni Ernst’s dismissive wave-away of constituent’s outrage over Medicaid cuts signal more voters to say something?

The stakes are definitely high. But reporters and headline writers have lately taken to declaring that Trump’s “domestic agenda” is at stake in this bill. That’s incorrect, since bulk of Trump’s actual domestic agenda—launching a trade war, deporting immigrants, negating due process, debilitating the courts, crippling government, pardoning criminal supporters, and gathering money—have all been executed without Congress. What’s actually at stake are his tax cut promises to individuals and corporations, some border security funds, and a military spending increase, while cutting food aid and medical treatment for the poor and working poor. No small things, but hardly the entirety of his domestic agenda.

Still, Trump has taken steps within the last week to immunize his own fortune from the dollar-weakening effects of exploding debt and trade chaos. Bitcoin stands to gain if investors lose confidence in the dollar and edge away from it as the world’s reserve currency. And Trump now has a $2.5 billion bet in that direction. Meanwhile, Trump, the White House and its aligned media are in a full-blown disinformation campaign about about the true consequences of the bill. Watch closely to see how immune senators feel.