President Donald Trump has promised the American people that he will codify the federal government cuts requested by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the group’s former lead advisor, Elon Musk.
Trump reaffirmed his commitment to permanently slashing bloated federal spending on Friday.
The president pledged that the DOGE cuts will be codified once his “Big, Beautiful Bill” clears Congress.
He made the pledge while speaking at a press conference alongside Musk, the architect behind DOGE and a key Trump ally in rooting out government waste.
Trump said the savings from DOGE will ultimately total “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Musk is stepping back from his formal White House role to refocus on his businesses.
However, both men made clear that the drive for efficiency is far from over.
“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.”
While the House has already passed the bill, it now faces hurdles in the Senate, including from some Republican senators who say it doesn’t go far enough in cutting federal spending.
Musk himself expressed disappointment in the House version, criticizing it for expanding the deficit:
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk told CBS News.
“But I don’t know if it can be both.
“My personal opinion,” he added.
Conservative lawmakers echoed Musk’s concerns.
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Warren Davidson (R-OH) both voted against the bill, citing fiscal responsibility.
On the Senate side, Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT) raised alarms over the federal debt and Social Security.
“Everybody likes a tax cut,” Johnson said, “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.’”
During an interview, Sen. Lee told 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.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller clarified the legislative path forward.
Miller noted that DOGE reforms must come through a rescissions or appropriations package, not the current reconciliation bill.
“DOGE cuts are to discretionary spending (e.g., the federal bureaucracy),” Miller wrote on X.
“Under Senate budget rules, you cannot cut discretionary spending (only mandatory) in a reconciliation bill.
“So DOGE cuts would have to be done through what is known as a rescissions package or an appropriations bill.”
As the Trump administration keeps the pressure on Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy, the battle over how to rein in reckless spending is just beginning.
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