DOGE caucus leader says Elon Musk made a 'massive exaggeration' about spending cuts

Business Insider

8 hours ago

Shortly after the feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk hit its apex on Thursday, a key DOGE-minded lawmaker in Congress had some pointed words about the world's richest man.
"Most everybody knew Elon was exaggerating to what he could do," Republican Rep. Blake Moore of Utah told reporters outside the Capitol. "He was claiming finding $4 billion a day in cuts he was going to get. One time, he said $2 trillion, he was going to find."
"It's a massive exaggeration, and I think people are recognizing that now," Moore said.
The Utah Republican is one of the three co-leaders of the House DOGE caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers who had hoped to support Musk's cost-cutting efforts.
The caucus met a handful of times at the beginning of the year, and leaders previously told BI that they intended to compile a report of potential cost-saving measures for DOGE at the end of the first quarter of this year.
That didn't end up happening, in part because the White House DOGE Office ultimately had little interaction with the caucus. One Democratic member declared the group to be "dead" last month.
"We've always been a little frustrated that there was such limited interaction," Moore said on Thursday. "We couldn't really identify where we were to lean in, and we had a ton of folks ready to support it, but there just wasn't that interaction."
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Moore said that he wanted to pursue cuts to federal spending through the bipartisan government funding process, saying that there are "plenty of Democrats that recognize there's waste in our government."
GOP leaders have said they'll pursue DOGE cuts both through that process and through "rescission" packages, the first of which is set to be voted on in the House next week. The first package, which includes cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid, is $9.4 billion, just a fraction of the cost savings that Musk once predicted.
"It's definitely kind of over-promising, under-delivering," Moore said.
Musk's public feud with Trump began last week, when the tech titan began criticizing the "Big Beautiful Bill" that Republicans are trying to muscle through Congress.
The bill is projected to increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, though Republicans have argued that those forecasts do not account for the economic growth that might be spurred by the bill.
That feud boiled over on Tuesday, with the two men engaging in a war of words on their respective social media platforms.
"When I saw Musk start posting, just parroting false claims about the tax reconciliation bill, it was clear something's amiss," Moore said. "And so it escalated, yeah. It escalated very quickly."