Spending in President Donald Trump’s signature legislation is “debt slavery for the American people,” the president’s former advisor Elon Musk said Wednesday in a social media post. Utah’s senior U.S. senator agreed, adding “Well said,” as he shared the post with his followers.
As the president’s megabudget bill awaits a vote in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mike Lee has been raising concerns about what he considers government overspending. On his prolific personal X account Wednesday morning, Lee shared a post from Musk in which the South African tech billionaire claimed that 25% of all U.S. government revenue currently goes to interest payments on the national debt.
“The accrued interest on the national debt now exceeds $1 trillion a year — more than we spend on national defense. And yet Congress continues to add to the debt at an astounding rate of $2 trillion per year — with our national debt growing faster than our economy,” Lee wrote. “Unless we turn this around quickly, our debt and deficit will increasingly threaten our ability to fund the basic operations of government.”
Government overspending, he added, “harms hardworking Americans — especially the poor, who are hit hardest by the invisible, highly regressive tax this inevitably creates (in the form of inflation).”
Musk shared Lee’s post and added, “This is debt slavery for the American people.”
“It’s a kind of servitude that never sleeps,” Lee responded, “and from which no American — even those who have yet to be born — can escape without aggressive reform by Congress.”
Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment about what specific changes he would like to see in the bill before he could support it, or about what “debt slavery” is and why the senator felt it was an appropriate description for the legislation.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as the Trump-backed budget bill is named, passed the House last month by a one-vote margin. The legislation as currently constructed includes an extension on tax cuts instituted during Trump’s first term, an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and several provisions that members of the House now say they were unaware of when they voted for the bill, including a ban on state regulations of artificial intelligence and a provision that would make it harder for judges to hold people in contempt of court.
It also includes billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, the government-sponsored program that provides health insurance to low-income Americans, and changes to the Affordable Care Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated could result in nearly 11 million people losing health coverage across the country. According to another estimate, more than 100,000 Utahns risk losing their insurance under the bill.
The bill now requires the approval of the Senate, where Lee hopes to leave his mark. In recent days, he has publicly declared his concerns about government spending, and his back-and-forth with Musk Wednesday came as the CBO released a new estimate finding that the legislation would add $2.4 trillion to the already hefty national debt.
Lee floated an idea Wednesday for a way to address the deficit that also apparently has the backing of Musk: Ban members of Congress from running for reelection if the deficit is more than 3% of the country’s gross domestic product.
“Would you support a constitutional amendment rendering all members of Congress ineligible for re-election whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3% of GDP?” Lee asked his followers on X.
Currently, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the U.S. deficit is about 6.4% of the U.S. gross domestic product, which would, under Lee’s proposal, render him ineligible to run again.
