Donald Trump Claims ‘Nobody’s Going To Feel It’ When Elon Musk Slashes Government

Former President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he’d consider giving billionaire Elon Musk a role slashing the federal government if he returns to the White House next year.

Trump also insisted, oddly, that nobody would even notice.

Musk, one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, has said that he would subtract trillions from federal spending — and said the cuts would result in “some temporary hardship” for the country.

Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a Tuesday interview, Trump said there were “a lot of roles” Musk could take in a new U.S. administration, but that Musk has been focused on spending.

“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.”

Trump has campaigned less on cost cutting than on mass deportations of migrants and targeted tax cuts for specific voting groups, but Musk has taken on an increasingly prominent role in the campaign and offered to serve as something of a czar of budget cutting. And Musk hasn’t shied from stating that spending cuts could create material hardship.

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” Musk said last week in a virtual town hall event. “President Trump is supportive that everyone’s taking a haircut here because we’ve got to — America’s got to live within its means, and we can’t be a wastrel.”

Musk has said that he could easily cut $2 trillion out of the federal government’s more than $6 trillion in annual spending. It’s hard to imagine how nobody would notice a cut of that magnitude; shielding Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and defense spending, as Trump would presumably want to do, could require a whopping 89% cut to everything else, including popular programs like school lunches and national parks, as well as necessities like transportation and food assistance.

Of course, the White House doesn’t control spending — Congress does — and not even most Republican lawmakers would agree to such drastic cuts.

The president submits a budget outline to Congress every year, a symbolic document that is essentially a statement of priorities. In his final budget sent to Congress in 2020, Trump proposed about $3 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s a lot, but still a lot less than $2 trillion in just one year like Musk suggested.

Trump’s administration claimed more savings than that, though, including through a plan to “rightsize” government and cut all annual agency and program budgets — aside from those related to defense — by 2% in unspecified ways for $1.55 trillion in savings, and $844 billion in health care-related spending cuts that the CBO said were too vague to be evaluated.

In response to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Congress wound up spending trillions more than expected, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, for things like extra unemployment benefits, forgivable loans to businesses and direct payments to almost every adult in America.

Jonathan Nicholson contributed reporting.