Conservative frustrations are boiling over Congress’ lack of action to codify spending cuts pursued by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Tech billionaire Elon Musk — who headed up the DOGE effort — made waves this week when took aim at a sprawling package passed by the House last week to advance Trump’s tax priorities, while raising concerns over the potential deficit impact of the measure.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a snippet of an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that airs later this week.
His comments add to a growing chorus of complaints made by fiscal hawks in Congress and prominent conservatives outside Capitol Hill in the days since the House’s passage of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a former congressman, knocked GOP lawmakers on Tuesday in a post on X, while saying Musk took “massive incoming — including attacks on his companies as well as personal smears — to lead the effort on DOGE.”
“To see Republicans in Congress cast aside any meaningful spending reductions (and, in fact, fully fund things like USAID) is demoralizing and represents a betrayal of the voters who elected them,” DeSantis wrote.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller over the weekend took to X to clarify that the Trump agenda megabill was not the correct vehicle for the DOGE cuts.
“DOGE cuts would have to be done through what is known as a rescissions package or an appropriations bill,” Miller said. “The Big Beautiful Bill is NOT an annual budget bill and does not fund the departments of government. It does not finance our agencies or federal programs.”
But frustrated conservatives are amping up the pressure.
“Personally I want to pass DOGE cuts every single week until the bloated out of control government is reigned back in. As a country, we cannot survive our national debt and honestly, we may be past the point of return. We should be aggressively attacking our debt and aggressively, cutting all waste fraud, and abuse and unnecessary programs,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote Wednesday in a post teasing a recissions package. “Our future literally is in peril.”
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) wrote on X on Saturday that, “Every DOGE cut targets waste, fraud, and abuse. Congress MUST codify them quickly. What’s the holdup?!”
And Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has said he will not vote for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in the Senate, wrote Thursday that “@ElonMusk is right. The House’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill would explode the debt by $4 trillion, undermining all the cuts @DOGE has made. There’s nothing beautiful about that.”
Amid the uproar, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday pointed to Stephen Miller’s defense while vowing to codify the DOGE cuts through the appropriations process or by approving administration requests to claw back funds.
He said the House-passed bill to enact Trump’s agenda is intended to “build on DOGE’s success.” And he added the GOP-led House is “eager and ready to act on DOGE’s findings” by quickly passing a package to codify the cuts and using the “appropriations process to swiftly implement President Trump’s 2026 budget.”
The White House is expected to send a formal request to Congress next week asking lawmakers to rescind more than $9 billion in funding for programs like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funds to PBS and NPR.
The amount represents a fraction of the $175 billion in “estimated savings” that DOGE says it’s racked up as of May 26 through a combination of efforts, including workforce reductions, grants and contract cancellations, regulatory savings and asset sales.
Republicans have so far been bullish on the chances of the package to codify the cuts passing and want the White House to send further requests if the plan makes its way through Congress, as the Trump administration’s sweeping cost-cutting and government-reshaping operation has continued to run into roadblocks in the court.
The request to claw back money, known as a recissions package, does not need any Democratic votes to pass. But some moderate Republicans have withheld support for the forthcoming plan until they see text, particularly amid some concern over what public broadcasting cuts could mean for constituents back home.
GOP leaders are also still looking to full-year appropriations as a path to lock in the changes pursued by DOGE, noting the restrictive process Republicans are using to advance Trump’s agenda would not allow for cuts to discretionary spending.
However, some Republican funding negotiators in the Senate, where Democratic votes will be needed to pass funding legislation for fiscal year 2026, previously indicated they won’t be a rubber stamp on approving DOGE cuts.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) told The Hill back in March that “it could be possible that, after careful consideration, we would decide to codify some of them.” However, she added that the efforts shouldn’t be applied “across the board.”
Conservatives are growing antsy in Congress around what they see as a failure by lawmakers to secure more significant spending cuts in efforts to tackle the nation’s $36 trillion-plus debt.
Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio), who was one of the two Republicans to vote against the bill Thursday, raised concern about deficit projections when explaining his opposition to reporters last week.
“When you look at the outside groups that do dynamic models, even the most aggressive dynamic models, grow the deficit in this Congress.”
Some deficit hawks in the Senate have signaled some heavy-handed changes could be in store for the House bill, demanding more aggressive action to cut spending and lower the nation’s deficits.
“Have you been watching what the bond markets are doing in relation to the one big, beautiful bill? They’re not thinking it’s a very big, beautiful bill,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said to reporters shortly after the bill passed the lower chamber last Thursday.
“Everybody likes a tax cut, but when you’re $37 trillion in debt on the path to over $60 trillion in debt, right when the Social Security trust fund is running out, somebody’s got to be the dad that says, ‘I know everybody wants to go to Disney World, but we just can’t afford it,’” he said.
Federal budget analysts estimated the cost of extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts — a cornerstone of the legislative package — along with measures to nix taxes on tips and overtime pay, would come close to $4 trillion in the coming years.
House Republicans have crafted a suite of proposals seeking to cut federal spending by well more than a $1 trillion in the coming years to accompany the tax cuts. Reforms to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) account for a chunk of those savings.
The White House has gone on defense in recent days, dismissing recent cost estimates, while arguing the package will reduce the nation’s deficits overall as other Republicans defended the tax cuts as “pro-growth” and good for the economy.
Asked in the Oval Office about his reaction to Musk’s criticism, Trump replied, “Well, our reaction’s a lot of things” before pivoting to the votes needed to get the bill out of Congress.
“Number one, we have to get a lot of votes, we can’t be cutting — we need to get a lot of support and we have a lot of support,” he said. “We had to get it through the House, the House was, we had no Democrats. You know, if it was up to the Democrats, they’ll take the 65 percent increase.”
In a post on X on Wednesday, Stephen Miller accused “self-described libertarians siding with lefty bureaucrats at CBO who claim the Big Beautiful Bill will ‘explode the debt.’”
“BBB cuts taxes, cuts spending, reforms welfare and *ends mass migration*,” he said, referring to measures in the bill to boost funding for Trump’s deportation and border security plans.
“Since when have libertarians argued that NOT raising taxes ‘costs’ the government money? Private money yet to be earned does not “belong” to the government,” he also wrote.
But some hardline conservatives are holding out hope for further reductions.
“Hopefully, the Senate will succeed with the Big Beautiful Bill where the House missed the moment,” Davidson wrote on X on Wednesday. “Don’t hope someone else will cut deficits someday, know it has been done this Congress.”
