Last month, TPM reporter Emine Yücel was up on Capitol Hill attempting to pin down House Republicans on a topic that few wanted to directly discuss: whether or not the Republican conference as a whole was willing to act on recent pronouncements from a few vocal, far-right members that the party would look into sweeping cuts to the social safety net in the new Congress.
At the time, potential cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps were being discussed as a means to offset the costs of extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy. When Emine was on the Hill, Republicans’ visions of slashing the social safety net had also recently gotten the enthusiastic support of Elon Musk, who announced that he, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, planned to use their mantle at DOGE to identify $2 trillion in federal spending cuts during Trump’s first term. (Never mind the fact that the full discretionary budget is only $1.7 trillion.)
House Republicans were salivating over what form those supposed sweeping cuts might take:
“Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, you got to look at all that,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told TPM when asked about the DOGE agenda. “Farm bill, you got to look at it.”
“But the devil is in the details, until you get there and hear both sides … I don’t know,” Norman said, before acknowledging that House Republicans may have a math problem when it comes to corralling lawmakers to support slashing funds from some of these entitlement programs.
Fast forward a month and Musk is already attempting to revise estimations of how epic the DOGE government-slashing effort will be. During an interview on his disintegrating Twitter platform X Wednesday, Musk admitted to political strategist Mark Penn that his plan to identify $2 trillion in governmental savings was, perhaps, an exaggeration. Per NBC News:
“Do you think the $2 trillion is a realistic number now that you’re looking more closely at it?” he asked.
“I think we’ll try for $2 trillion. I think that’s the best-case outcome,” Musk said. “But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting 1,” he said, meaning $1 trillion in spending cuts.
Musk, though, didn’t admit an early defeat, saying he could still help Trump achieve “an epic outcome.”
“If we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth, such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome,” he said.
The walk-back is in line with how Trump himself has handled discussions of just about every wildly unrealistic promise he made on the campaign trail in recent weeks. Earlier in December Trump was roundly criticized for trying to quietly backtrack on his vow to lower grocery prices.
“I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will,” Trump admitted during his TIME Person of the Year interview.
And just this week, Trump’s officials seemingly acknowledged that his cartoonishly unfeasible promise to end Russia’s war on Ukraine within “24 hours” of taking office was never gonna happen. Trump said this week his administration was looking to wind down the conflict within “six months.” Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, whom he appointed as his special envoy for the war in Ukraine, told Fox News this week that the incoming administration would seek to end the conflict within “100 days.”
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