Elon Musk lashes out at Senate’s take on Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as support comes down to the wire
Elon Musk has slammed the Senate version of President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” as support for the motion to proceed with the legislation in the upper chamber comes down to the wire.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote on X on Saturday afternoon. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
“This bill raises the debt ceiling by $5 TRILLION, the biggest increase in history, putting America in the fast lane to debt slavery!” he added.
Republicans are attempting to garner sufficient support on Saturday to pass a motion to proceed with the legislation. Senate Republicans dropped the final text of the sprawling 940-page bill late on Friday evening.
Trump has said he wants the Senate to pass the legislation — which would include sweeping spending cuts to pay for the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, as well as increased spending for the military, oil exploration, and immigration enforcement — by the Fourth of July.
Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats would object to the bill moving forward without the text being read on the Senate floor.
“We will be here all night if that’s what it takes to read it,” he said Saturday.
Reading the nearly 1,000-page bill on the floor is estimated to take 15 hours.
Republicans, who have 53 seats in the Senate, plan to pass the bill using the process of budget reconciliation. That would allow them to sidestep a filibuster from Democrats as long as the legislation relates to the budget. For the past week, the Senate parliamentarian’s office has issued advisories about which parts do not comply with the rules of reconciliation.
The biggest sticking point was major changes to Medicaid, with Republican proposing the steepest cuts to the federal healthcare program in history.
The legislation would add work requirements for certain Medicaid recipients and limit how much money states can tax health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes to raise money for Medicaid.
But the American Hospital Association said this would devastate rural hospitals that rely on Medicaid dollars. The parliamentarian removed the provider tax provision, but the new version of the bill simply delays when the cap goes into effect.
Before the text dropped, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who hails from a state with a large number of rural hospitals and that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in 2023, said he was a “no” on the motion to proceed because of Medicaid.
“It will cause a lot of people to have to be moved off of Medicaid,” he told The Independent on Friday evening. “It’s just inescapable. The price tag’s too high.”
The legislation also rolls back some of the renewable energy tax credits implemented in the Inflation Reduction Act, a signature achievement from former President Joe Biden that passed Congress through the same budget reconciliation process.
If the bill passes the Senate, it will return to the House of Representatives, which passed it last month. But plenty of House Republicans have objected to the Senate’s changes, teeing up yet another legislative battle over Trump’s massive bill.
Trump lobbied senators on Saturday while playing golf with Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Tillis, who is up for re-election in 2028, outlined his opposition to the bill again on Saturday, saying in a statement that the bill would “result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding” for his state, including hospitals and rural communities.
“This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population,” he added.
Less than an hour after announcing his opposition to the bill, Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana said he plans to support move forward on a vote.
He will introduce an amendment that strips out parts of the bill that open the door to selling off public lands for private development. “I will vote yes on the motion to proceed. We must quickly pass the Big Beautiful Bill to advance President Trump’s agenda,” he said.
This is a developing story
