Elon Musk and Rand Paul are right. The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is just a bloated mess.

President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package is reportedly in jeopardy, with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky making a strong push against the tax and spend bill.

On May 22, the legislative package narrowly passed the House of Representatives on a mostly party-line vote, with Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio opposing the bill.

The legislation, dubbed by the president as a “big, beautiful bill,” seeks to ram through as many of Trump’s legislative priorities in one bill as possible. This includes extending his 2017 tax cuts, ramping up military spending, temporarily cutting taxes on tips, proposing reforms to Medicaid and rescinding green energy tax credits, among many other things.

While many provisions are reasonable and welcome, at the end of the day the proposal would blow up the national debt by trillions of dollars above current baseline projections. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the bill would grow the 2027 budget deficit by over a third.

Blowing up the national debt after all the hype behind the Department of Government Efficiency and Trump’s own vow to “to do what has not been done in 24 years — balance the federal budget” shows the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are completely unserious about fiscal responsibility.

“All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Associated Press. “There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.”

This is so obvious that many who have been allied with the president are willing to speak out about this.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk told it like it is, writing on X, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

Likewise, Sen. Paul of Kentucky has ramped up his criticism of the bill. Over the weekend, while on “Face the Nation,” he condemned the budget-busting deficits created by it but also said “a vehicle for increasing spending for the military and for the border,” and “a bill by the military-industrial complex advocates who are padding the military budget.”

One particular example of waste he points to is border wall funding in the bill. Paul argued that while 1,000 miles of border wall would cost $6.5 billion, the bill would budget $46 billion for border wall construction.

In response, the president attacked Paul as having “very little understanding” of the bill, calling the bill “a big WINNER!!!”

While the Democratic Party continues to work through its post-election identity crisis, we can only hope more Republicans begin rediscovering fiscal responsibility and fiscal conservatism.