Elon Musk promises to fund campaigns against Republicans who vote for Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ bill

Elon Musk promised to bankroll primary challenges against Republican lawmakers who vote to pass legislation representing a sizable portion of Donald Trump’s political agenda on Monday as the Senate debated its final passage.

The Tesla CEO and former DOGE overlord blew up at Trump and the Republican Congress over the bill earlier this year. Musk, along with Republicans like Rand Paul in the Senate, believe that the bill’s spending cuts are insufficient to fund its other provisions and point to projections of trillions added to the national debt over the next decade as reason it should be opposed.

But despite failing to meet the goals of deficit hawks to be deficit-neutral or even cut the national debt, Donald Trump and Republican leadership are pressing forward with the legislation. The bill is set to extend the 2017 GOP tax cuts as well as fund a massive surge of mass deportation measures for the federal government, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents. To fund the plan, the GOP plans to impose work requirements and other cuts on Medicaid and food stamp (SNAP) programs.

On Monday, Musk vowed to fund Republican primary challengers against any senator or House member who voted for the legislation.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he wrote on Twitter.

Musk’s opposition is far from new. He publicly came out against the legislation only days after his heralded departure from the Trump administration, which coincided with the end of the allowance of his special government employee designation.

But the DOGE chief’s time in government was fraught with controversy that clearly rubbed Musk the wrong way. His meddling in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year was villainized by Democrats, who won the election as a result, and Musk himself was the subject of damaging and embarrassing profiles examining his alleged use of ketamine and the growing horde of children he has fathered with long list of women.

Upon his departure, Musk accused the Republican-controlled Congress of undermining the Trump legislative agenda with a bloated, pork-filled budget — though despite his protestations, the real bulk of the deficit spending in the bill is related to the expansion of tax cuts. An estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) over the weekend put the debt increase figure related to the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” at $3.3trn.

Musk also went a different route with his criticism, engaging in a series of deeply personal attacks against the president — who’d lightly bashed him over degradation of the “big, beautiful bill”. In a now-deleted message, Musk wrote on Twitter that Trump was supposedly mentioned within the “Epstein Files”, the investigation into convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and blamed that factor for the refusal of the federal government to publish materials related to the Epstein investigation in full.

Those allegations have been echoed by some Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Dan Goldman.

In May, Goldman wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi “to express my grave concern about what appears to be a concerted effort by you to delay and even prevent the release of the Jeffrey Epstein Files in their entirety – potentially at the direction of the sitting President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

He questioned in his letter whether the delay was related to an effort by the president to “Hide[his] Extensive Relationship with Epstein”.

Musk’s criticism of Trump personally cooled after aides for the two men intervened and sought to calm tensions. But his efforts to kill the legislation continued through June.

In one tweet earlier this month, he offhandedly suggested the formation of a new political party “that actually cares about the people.”

Having forced his way into the president’s inner circle over the final weeks of the 2024 election and the presidential transition period over the winter, Musk was once an ever-present figure alongside Trump at events and even in the White House, where his young son accompanied him at times.

The vicious feud between him and the president ended that relationship, however, and while the two have held off from open attacks it’s clear that Musk is no longer welcome at the White House or with Trump generally. As a result, Musk lost a vast amount of political capital, and while he could concievably fund a number of primary challenges with his vast wealth, the world’s richest man lacks one thing Trump still commands: a level of obediance and fear within the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate that manifests as ardent public loyalty.

A massive piece of legislation, the “big, beautiful bill” includes an extension of the 2017 Republican tax cuts as well as a surge in funding for Trump’s mass deportation efforts. The legislation would fund the hiring of nearly 20,000 new immigration agents, including 10,000 new ICE personnel alone.

Republicans have only 53 seats in the Senate, which is not enough to overcome a filibuster by the Democrats. As a result, they plan to use a process called budget reconciliation to pass the measure in a marathon “vote-a-rama” session that began Monday morning and is expected to conclude late into the evening. Two Republican senators have announced plans to oppose the bill, and two more are publicly on the fence about final passage even as the vote approaches.