Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s call for “at least” $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending is drawing skepticism from experts as the billionaire tech magnate cements himself as one of former President Trump’s most prominent backers.
“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk at the former president’s recent rally held at the Madison Square Garden in New York.
Without offering specifics, Musk said, in response, that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” in a brief moment that has since gained widespread attention online and drawn mixed reactions from budget world.
While many experts agree that policymakers must take action to confront the nation’s climbing debt, which stands at nearly $36 trillion, some are tossing cold water on Musk’s comments.
“He could be a big voice in the government, but, realistically, there isn’t much political willingness to do the tough stuff that they need to be done to get the budget under control,” Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview.
“So, whatever Elon Musk thinks and whatever Donald Trump thinks, it’s got to get through Congress,” Lachman said.
Figures from the Treasury Department show the federal government spent north of $6.7 trillion over the yearlong period that ended in September, running a deficit of more than $1.8 trillion during the time frame.
A categorical breakdown of that spending showed Social Security at the top of the list, with a more than $1.4 trillion price tag, followed by other items like health, interest payments, Medicare and national defense. Together, those items amounted to well more than half of government spending for the 12-month stretch.
Trump pledged in September to establish a government efficiency commission headed up by Musk to conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reforms.”
Trump also repeatedly lauded Musk as a “cost-cutter” and said there are “a lot of roles he could take” during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity earlier this week.
“But here’s the thing, he feels there’s such waste, fraud and abuse in our budgets, and he’s right, and he’s a great cost-cutter,” Trump said, “and he’ll cut costs without anybody even knowing it.”
“Nobody’s going to know, nobody’s going to feel it. He will cut costs, and he feels he can save $2 trillion. If he does that, our budget is more than balanced.”
Pressed about how such Trump’s proposed commission would help bring down the nation’s debt, Musk said in a recent online town hall that he would “consider it a victory even to slow down the debt,” before adding that, if he had “full power to take action” that he would “balance the budget immediately.”
“Most importantly, we have to reduce spending to look within our means, and you know that that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long term prosperity,” he also said at the time.
A similar idea previously gained momentum in the House GOP last year, as Republicans pushed to balance the federal budget in 10 years both parties fought over how to address the nation’s debt limit.
However, the effort fell apart as Democrats accused Republicans of going after entitlement programs. House Republicans also clashed at the time over where ideas to shore up solvency for entitlement programs or potential reductions to military spending would fit into talks to significantly curb spending.
Asked about Musk’s recent comments, Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), said if he’s “talking about $2 trillion in savings over 10 years,” the task is “absolutely doable.”
“But it would be hard to say that you could cut $2 trillion out of a budget in a single year without compromising some of the fundamental objectives of the government that are widely agreed upon,” MacGuineas added.
When factoring in the math, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, said cuts on such a scale could yield significant spending reductions for government programs.
“Thirty-three percent cut to every single program in the budget,” he argued. “That’s a 33 percent cut to Social Security, that’s a 33 percent cut to Medicare, that’s a 33 percent cut to every program that we do to help the vets right, compensation and benefits and their health care.”
There is ongoing debate between both sides of the aisle as to how much Trump’s proposed policies would add to the national debt in the coming years, if elected.
A rough analysis released by CRFB last month estimated the plans proposed by both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris could increase the national debt by trillions of dollars through 2035 – though Trump’s agenda is still estimated to cost roughly twice as much as the policies put forward by his competitor.
Among the biggest line items highlighted by the group was an estimated $5.3 trillion price tag attached to Trump’s proposals to extend and modify parts of his signature 2017 tax law. Harris’s proposal to extend some parts of that plan would also cost almost $3 trillion from 2026-35.
Trump’s campaign has come out strongly against the analysis. Trump campaign national press Karoline Leavitt said the former president’s “pro-growth” tax policies would help “Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history while eliminating taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security for [hard-working] Americans,”
Richard Stern, head of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the Project 2025 plan, also defended Trump’s 2017 tax law, while arguing that its policies “likely brought in more revenue than a loss.”
“Deficits from tax cuts, depending on the tax cut, can actually be a better use of that money by handing it back to the private sector,” he argued.
He also backed Musk’s comments on cutting spending, while citing his leadership at X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Even at Twitter, he has a private company making a profit, he figured out he could cut 85 percent of the workforce and actually have a better product and get higher margins if you have a more valuable company,” he said. However, he also cast doubt on the chances of $2 trillion in cuts in the short term.
“If the question is actually cutting $2 trillion starting in January, probably not, right? But, if the question is like, if you come back in 2030 could the government be spending $2 trillion less in that year than you would have expected?” Stern said. “I think that’s pretty easy to do.”
The Hill reached to Musk through X for comment.
