Bannon Rips Into Musk Over Call for a Third Party, Argues DOGE Failed to Actually Cut Spending

Former Trump White House advisor turned MAGA podcaster, Steve Bannon, tore into Elon Musk on Monday over his lack of results while leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Bannon has become one of Musk’s fiercest critics in recent months, going so far as to call for a special counsel investigation into the Tesla billionaire, hammering the tech entrepreneur over his many government contracts and alleged drug use.

“Elon Musk is out and, it’s not that I told you this was going to happen, but he’s out lighting up the president and lighting up MAGA and claiming it’s time for a third party,” Bannon said on his show, in response to Musk attacking Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” budget bill earlier in the day.

“And that this is, he calls it, I think, in all his maturity, the ‘Porky Pig Bill.’ He’s going on about the spending, hammering it, hammering it. 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 10 years,” Bannon said, adding:

This was a trillion dollars because we asked him to make sure the question was asked very specifically. 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. What we do have is a $9 billion rescission. And all of that is programmatic. I haven’t seen anything specifically about fraud and abuse put forward from the Pentagon or anywhere.

In late April, the Partnership for Public Service (PSP) found that from the $160 billion DOGE had claimed to save the federal government, some additional $130 billion would need to be spent. The nonpartisan research group came up with the sum by calculating the “costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity,” reported CBS News at the time.

The cost of DOGE’s activity shines a spotlight on how little it has actually saved, while ending programs that countless people around the globe counted on for various lifesaving needs, like basic food and medicine provided by USAID.

Watch the clip above via WarRoom.