Republican budget guru Elon Musk admitted Wednesday that his vision of $2 trillion in spending cuts is not very realistic.
The billionaire entrepreneur and President-elect Donald Trump consigliere said in an interview on his website X with Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster turned marketing executive, that the $2 trillion figure was merely aspirational.
“We’ll try for 2 trillion. I think that’s like the best-case outcome, but I do think that you kind of have to have some overage,” Musk said. “I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”
It’s a notable retrenchment from Musk’s prior position. On the campaign trail in October, Musk said he could find “at least $2 trillion” to cut from the federal government’s annual budget of more than $6 trillion.
Cutting $2 trillion in one year was always an almost impossible goal, however, since Trump has ruled out any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which are major drivers of federal spending. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, say they won’t touch the military, leaving only a fraction of the budget for Musk to work with.
Trump and Republicans have nevertheless embraced Musk as a budget visionary, with Trump naming him to a nongovernment advisory panel called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Republicans then jumped on the DOGE bandwagon without realizing the name is a joke based on an internet meme about a Shiba Inu dog.
It’s hard to see how Musk’s budget-slashing vision, which is supposed to close the gap between taxes and spending, will fit with Republican plans to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, potentially at a cost of $5 trillion over a decade, with trillions more in additional tax cuts Trump promised on the campaign trail.
Still, Musk repeated part of his prior boast that cutting federal spending is actually very easy.
“In terms of saving money in the government, well, as you, as you know, it’s a very target-rich environment for saving money,” Musk said Wednesday. “It’s like being in a room full of targets, like you can close your eyes and you can’t miss.”
In the interview with Penn, Musk didn’t specify any of the targets he had in mind, but Penn praised the DOGE concept.
“I think the country is really waiting to see this effort. They’re behind it, they’re optimistic,” Penn said.