Jacob Heilbrunn
Elon Musk has strong feelings about President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On Tuesday, he uttered an inconvenient truth, calling it a “disgusting abomination” on X. Musk noted that, far from decreasing the federal budget deficit, it will add several trillion and “burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
The White House purports to be unfazed by Musk’s heresy. “Look the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “It doesn’t change the President’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it.”
Musk does not arrive at the increasingly testy debate over the bill with clean hands. He is widely acknowledged to have bungled the DOGE effort to put the federal government on the fiscal equivalent of a SlimFast diet. The Economist has a new editorial simply titled, “Elon Musk’s failure in government.” It notes that his failure will ensure that future reform efforts are even more difficult to enact.
But that failure does not mean that Musk’s salty comments about Trump’s bill are misplaced. On the contrary, they form part of a growing chorus of skeptics. Take Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). In a post on X, Greene stated that she had been unaware of a specific provision in the bill that affected the ability of individual states to regulate AI:
Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years. I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there. We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous.
This needs to be stripped out in the Senate. When the OBBB comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it. We should be reducing federal power and preserving state power. Not the other way around. Especially with rapidly developing AI that even the experts warn they have no idea what it may be capable of.
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