Republican congressional leaders pushed back Wednesday on Elon Musk’s harsh criticism of President Donald Trump’s signature budget bill as a fiscally dangerous “disgusting abomination.”

Sen. John Thune and Rep. Mike Johnson both aggressively defended Trump’s sprawling Big Beautiful Bill even as a non-partisan congressional watchdog group said it would add 2.4 trillion to the national debt, seemingly bolstering Musk’s point.

“I think he’s flat wrong, and I’ve told him as much,” Johnson, the House Speaker, told reporters at a news conference

Thune, the Senate majority leader, likewise downplayed the influence of Musk, who recently left the administration after a mostly failed effort to slash spending using his Department of Government Efficiency.

“Obviously [Musk] has some influence, got a big following on social media,” Thune said. “There are going to be a lot of people who share commentary about this, and we just got to make sure we’re doing everything we can to get our arguments out there.”

So far Trump himself has not commented on Musk’s withering attack on his top priority of his second term in office, a measure that would cut trillions in taxes and reduce spending by a significant, but much smaller, amount.

Musk, who was until recently considered the most powerful person in Washington next to Trump, showed no signs of softening his attack on Trump’s bill.

“This is debt slavery for the American people,” Musk tweeted Wednesday, after he said he could no longer stay silent about the impact of the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office, the most respected non-partisan arbiter of budget impacts, issued a report saying the bill as passed by the House would increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

The CBO also estimates the bill’s provisions would cause 10.9 million people to lose their health insurance under the bill by 2034.

The package would reduce federal outlays, or spending, by nearly $1.3 trillion over that period, while cutting taxes by $3.75 trillion, the watchdog group said. The vast majority of the tax savings will go to the ultra-wealthy and big business.

Musk and other fiscal hawks want the bill to cut spending by far more, or cut taxes by much less, in order to avoid further swelling the national debt.

But many moderate Republicans fear deep spending cuts, especially to health programs, could spark massive blowback against them at the ballot box in the midterm elections and beyond.

GOP leaders need to bridge the gaping divide to win the virtually unanimous support of Republican lawmakers in both chambers of Congress needed to pass the bill under the intricate reconciliation process.

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