President Donald Trump promised on Friday that the major spending cuts requested by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be codified after his “Big, Beautiful Bill” passes Congress.
Trump addressed DOGE during a press conference with the mastermind behind the waste-cutting effort, Elon Musk, who is taking a step back from his role in the White House to focus on his companies. The “Big, Beautiful Bill,” pushed by Trump and passed by the House, is currently in the hands of the Senate, where it faces scrutiny from some Republicans over its lack of cuts to federal spending.
“We are totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent and stopping much more of the waste in the months to come,” Trump said. “We want to get our great ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ finished and done. After that, we’re going to be — we put some of this into the bill, but most of it is going to come later. We’re going to have it [codified] by Congress.”
The president promised that the DOGE cuts will result in “hundreds of billions of dollars” in savings.
Earlier this week, Musk said he was “disappointed” by the “massive” bill passed by the House, which he said “increases the budget deficit” and “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said in an interview with CBS News, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
Musk wasn’t alone in his criticism of the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” In the House, Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted against the legislation, citing the federal deficit. Similarly, Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT), among others, have raised concerns about the legislation.
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“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,’” Johnson said.
Sen. Lee told conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, “The Big, Beautiful Bill is big [but] isn’t yet as beautiful as it needs to be, but there’s still time to fix it. And the Senate version is going to be more aggressive.”
“So we got to address the spending crisis to a greater degree than this bill does,” Lee added.
Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, said earlier this week that the “Big, Beautiful Bill” was not the right package to cram through DOGE cuts.
“DOGE cuts are to discretionary spending. (Eg the federal bureaucracy). Under senate budget rules, you cannot cut discretionary spending (only mandatory) in a reconciliation bill,” Miller wrote. “So DOGE cuts would have to be done through what is known as a rescissions package or an appropriations bill.”