Steve Bannon knocked Elon Musk’s underwhelming effort to save billions in government spending after the departed DOGE head trashed Donald Trump’s spending bill.
On Monday’s broadcast of his War Room podcast, Bannon noted that Musk overpromised and underdelivered when it came to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s ability to root out fraud and wasteful spending.
“He’s going on about the spending, hammering it, hammering it,” Bannon said, an hour after Musk not only threatened to fund primary opponents of Republicans who supported the legislation, but called for the creation of a new political party to challenge the GOP, which he dubbed the “Porky Pig Party.”
“And this is what galls me about this: This was the guy that told the president he was going to cut two trillion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse, but then he backed it off to one trillion. And this was on an annual basis. This wasn’t over ten years,” Bannon said.
“This was a trillion dollars, because we asked him to make sure the question was asked very specifically,” the Trump ally continued.
“And he said it over and over again: a trillion dollars. And at the end of the day… I don’t know, folks, I know some of you fanboys said we got $160 billion, but we haven’t seen the $160 billion. What we do have is a $9 billion rescission, and all of that is programmatic. I haven’t seen anything specifically fraud and abuse put forward from the Pentagon or anywhere.”
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”—a loser with the American people, polls say—has been a chief cause of friction between Musk and allies of the president like Bannon.
Earlier this month, after Musk and Trump had their very public and sloppy falling out, Bannon lashed out at the tech billionaire by calling for a special counsel to look into his lucrative federal contracts and his drug use.
“I’m going to rip your f—ing face off,” Bannon reportedly exclaimed, prompting Musk to call Bannon “dumb as f–k.”
The legislation is currently in the Senate, where Republicans hope to vote on it before the July 4 holiday.
