House Speaker Mike Johnson says he texted Elon Musk after Musk criticized 'big beautiful bill'

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he reached out to Elon Musk after the tech billionaire criticized the Republicans’ “big beautiful bill.”

Mr. Musk, who officially left his special employee position on the Department of Government Efficiency last week, had described the legislation as a spending bill and took issue with several aspects of it, including “increasing the deficit.”

Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he persuaded friends and colleagues in Congress who felt similarly to see otherwise.

“I sent a long text message to my good friend Elon Musk, after he made those comments the other day to explain this is not a spending bill. This is a reconciliation package,” he said. “It is reconciling a budget. So there is some additional spending … for historic investments in border security, the largest in generations, because those are necessary expenditures.”

Mr. Johnson said many are not seeing the “tremendous and historic level of spending cuts that are also in the same package” and are too often referencing analysis from groups like the Congressional Budget Office.

“The CBO, they have projected anemic economic growth. They’re assuming a growth level of 1.8% over the next 10 years,” the House speaker said. “Never in US history has the US economy sustained less than 2% economic growth over a 10 year period.”

Senate Republicans said Thursday that they are eager to delve into President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and begin to make their own changes to the House-passed legislation by the July 4 weekend.

Republicans, who control the Senate with a 53-seat majority, will deploy their legislation through the budget reconciliation process as a way to avoid needing 60 votes and thus Democratic support. Any changes that are made to the legislation, though, means the measure is sent back to the House for further debate and another vote.

The bill, which is the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s agenda, includes sweeping spending cuts and tax cuts. It would stop the 2017 Trump tax cuts from expiring.

The legislation would provide funding for border security and national defense, and measures to spur American energy production. The more than 1,000-page bill includes Mr. Trump’s orders for immigration and the border, the tax code, education, energy, the military, the judiciary, health services and entitlement programs.

These are some of Mr. Trump’s policies that would be cemented into law if Republicans move the bill through Congress, as planned, in party-line votes.

The White House will soon send Congress a package of $9.4 billion cuts to current federal spending that includes slashing funding for NPR and PBS and a chunk of foreign aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

DOGE identified the cuts, which consist of $8.3 billion from foreign aid and $1.1 billion from NPR and PBS, which are funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The clawback would virtually zero out taxpayer support of the CPB, except for services such as Amber alerts and tornado warnings.