‘A disgusting abomination’: Musk tears into Trump budget bill days after leaving White House
Elon Musk has significantly upped the ante in his criticism of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending cut bill, calling it a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled … disgusting abomination” that will expand the “already gigantic” budget deficit.
The billionaire, who only formally left his top role in the White House last week, wrote on his X platform:
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.
It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.
Asked about Musk’s criticism, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill.”
“It doesn’t change the president’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it,” she added.
Last week, Musk had sharply criticised Trump’s spending plan, saying he was “disappointed” with the response to the federal cost-cutting efforts of his signature “department of government efficiency” (Doge) that would increase the budget deficit.
In an interview with CBS News, he called the bill too expensive and a measure that would “undermine” his work to make the government more “efficient”.
Key events
White House says it’s monitoring China’s compliance with trade deal
The White House said that it is actively monitoring China’s compliance with last month’s tariff agreement, in response to questions on how it is handling Beijing’s curbs on rare earth minerals.
Karoline Leavitt also reiterated that Donald Trump would soon be speaking with Chinese president Xi Jinping.
“I can assure you that the administration is actively monitoring China’s compliance with the Geneva trade agreement,” she told reporters. “Our administration officials continue to be engaged in correspondence with their Chinese counterparts.”
Fema ‘taking hurricane season seriously’, says White House after report that agency head ‘joked’ that he didn’t know about it
The White House said that Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is taking severe storms seriously, following a Reuters report that the head of the agency said he was not aware of hurricane season.
“We know that we are into hurricane season now, and I know Fema is taking this seriously, contrary to some of the reporting we have seen based on jokes that were made and leaks from meetings,” Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
Reuters reported that David Richardson, who has led Fema since early May, had told baffled staff he had not been aware that the US has a hurricane season. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Fema’s parent agency, told Reuters the comment was a joke and that Fema is prepared for hurricane season.
Trump has said Fema should be shrunk or even eliminated, arguing states can take on many of its functions, as part of a wider downsizing of the federal government. About 2,000 full-time Fema staff, one-third of its total, have been terminated or voluntarily left the agency since the start of the Trump administration in January.
At the same time, data seen by the Guardian has showed that more than a dozen National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices along the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico coast are understaffed as the US plunges into an expected active season for ruinous storms. There is a lack of meteorologists in 15 of the regional weather service offices along the coastline from Texas to Florida, as well as in Puerto Rico – an area that takes the brunt of almost all hurricanes that hit the US. Several offices, including in Miami, Jacksonville, Puerto Rico and Houston, lack at least a third of all the meteorologists required to be fully staffed.
And the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the Miami-based nerve center for tracking hurricanes, is short five specialists, the Guardian has learned, despite assurances from the Trump administration that it is fully staffed ahead of what’s anticipated to be a busy hurricane season that officially started on Sunday.
Experts have warned the turmoil unleashed by Trump upon the NWS and Fema, which has had multiple leadership changes and still does not have a completed plan for this year’s hurricane season, will dangerously hamper the response to a summer that will likely bring storms, floods and wildfires across the US.
Trump will attend Nato summit, White House says
Donald Trump will attend a summit of the transatlantic Nato alliance at The Hague later this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth will testify before the Senate armed services commitee at a 18 June hearing on the administration’s budget request, NBC is reporting, citing a source.
It will mark Hegseth’s first time appearing publicly before Congress since his confirmation.
Anna Betts
A federal prosecutor who helped lead the Department of Justice’s investigation into the January 6 attack on Congress has resigned – and, in a new interview, he criticized Donald Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of about 1,500 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, saying that it “sends a terrible message to the American people”.
Longtime assistant US attorney Greg Rosen, the former chief of the justice department’s Capitol siege section, sat down with CBS News after resigning over the weekend.
In the interview, Rosen said that he was “shocked, if not stunned” by the breadth of the pardons Trump issued to those involved in the 6 January 2021 attack just hours after his second presidential inauguration.
“I think the message that they send is that political violence towards a political goal is acceptable in a modern democratic society,” Rosen said. “That, from my perspective, is anathema to a constitutional republic.”
Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer behind some of the Trump administration’s firings, met privately with JD Vance at the White House this morning, CNN is reporting, citing sources.
The vice president met alone with Loomer at the Eisenhower executive office building, the outlet reports. It is not known what the pair discussed.
After Loomer’s last known visit to the White House in April, Donald Trump fired several national security council staffers whom she described as disloyal to the president.
The firings created the extraordinary situation where Loomer appeared to have more influence than Mike Waltz, who was the national security adviser at the time, over the NSC and undercut Waltz in having aides axed under him.
Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, has sued New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor over his arrest on a trespassing charge at an immigration detention center.
Baraka, who is also running for the Democratic nomination for New Jersey governor, alleges that he was arrested for trespassing without cause and maliciously prosecuted following a tense confrontation last month at a privately run immigration detention center in Newark.
The lawsuit names as defendants Alina Habba, the acting US attorney in New Jersey and former personal lawyer to Donald Trump, and Ricky Patel, a Homeland security department official who allegedly ordered the arrest.
The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest and malicious prosecution,” and also accuses Habba of defamation for comments she made about his case, which was later dropped.
“This is not about revenge,” Baraka said during a news conference.
Ultimately, I think this is about them taking accountability for what has happened to me.
Trump seeks to reshape judiciary as first nominees face Senate
Donald Trump’s first batch of judicial nominees is set to go before a Senate panel as the president looks to further reshape a judiciary whose members have stymied parts of his agenda.
Five of the 11 judicial nominees Trump has announced so far are slated to appear tomorrow before the Republican-led Senate judiciary committee, which will weigh whether to recommend them for the full Senate’s consideration.
Those nominees all have conservative bona fides that their supporters say will help Trump shift the ideological balance of the judiciary further to the right after making 234 appointments in his first term, which was a near-record for a president’s first four years in office.
Trump’s first-term appointees included three members of the supreme court, which since gaining a 6-3 conservative majority has curtailed abortion rights, rejected affirmative action policies on university campuses and limited the power of administrative agencies.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that Trump was committed to “restoring integrity to the judicial system, which begins with appointing America First judges, not unelected politicians in robes”. Among Wednesday’s nominees is Whitney Hermandorfer, who as a lawyer serving under Tennessee’s Republican attorney general has defended the state’s abortion ban and challenged federal protections for transgender youth.
Hermandorfer, who is nominated to a seat on the Cincinnati-based 6th US circuit court of appeals, will appear before the Senate panel with four nominees to fill trial court vacancies in Missouri. Those include Joshua Divine, Missouri’s solicitor general, who challenged Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts and has defended abortion and transgender healthcare restrictions.
Mike Davis, whose conservative Article III Project backs Trump’s judicial nominees, said that in his second term Trump “doesn’t need to appease the DC establishment with weak and timid judges”.
He is picking bold and fearless judges, like Emil Bove, who will follow the constitution instead of seeking establishment favor.
Bove, a justice department official who previously served as Trump’s defense lawyer in the New York criminal trial over hush money paid to an adult film star, was nominated last week to join the Philadelphia-based 3rd US circuit court of appeals, which if approved by the Senate would be a lifetime tenure.
His nomination drew criticism from Democrats and Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator who in a piece in the National Review called Bove’s nomination “disturbing”.
Millions of legal immigrants’ lives upended after social security freeze
Michael Sainato
Millions of legal immigrants may be left unable to work after the Social Security Administration quietly instituted a rule change to stop automatically issuing them social security numbers.
The Enumeration Beyond Entry program is an agreement between the SSA and the Department of Homeland Security, where US Citizenship and Immigration Services would provide social security with information from applicants for work authorization or naturalization.
The program began in 2017 under the first Trump Administration.
Without any public notice, on 19 March, the program was halted, impacting millions of immigrants every year and burdening Social Security Administration offices, as those applicants will now have to visit a Social Security Administration office and apply separately to receive a social security number.
Following the freeze, the Trump administration issued a memo on 15 April aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from receiving social security benefits, but provided no evidence of it being an issue.
Trump and Elon Musk, billionaire former leader of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have falsely claimed these programs are being used to attract unauthorized immigrants to vote for Democrats.
“Unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for Medicare or social security retirement benefits. Nor does any evidence exist that unauthorized immigrants fraudulently receive benefits in large numbers,” wrote Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an economics professor at Boston College, in a blog post.
Republican senator Katie Britt asks about funding for charter school programs, which in the budget proposal is raised by $50m to $600m. She asks how these funds will be used to expand options particularly in rural and underserved communities so parents have “more choice” for their children.
McMahon says “no child should be trapped in a failing school”, which led Trump to want to expand funding for charter schools. She says the “freedom of choice” you get with charter schools is important.
For context, as my colleague Marina Dunbar wrote last month: “Charter schools are set up as alternatives to traditional public schools. They typically operate under private management and often feature small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus.”
Last month the supreme court blocked an attempt led by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a major case involving religious rights in US education that challenged the constitutional separation of church and state.
Marina writes: “Opponents have said religious charter schools would force taxpayers to support religious indoctrination. Establishing them also could undermine non-discrimination principles, they argued, because religious charter schools might seek to bar employees who do not adhere to doctrinal teachings.”
Democratic senator Dick Durbin grills McMahon on why they’re cutting the borrower defense branch of the education department, which supports students who have been left “exploited” and struggling to pay off debt after attending for-profit schools.
After stumbling over what the department is doing to address the problem, McMahon points to counsellors in schools who can provide support to those students, before Durbin cuts her off to point out that, as we’ve just heard, the administration is reducing funding for those very counsellors too.
Republican senator, Shelley Moore Capito, asks how they plan to ensure that Jewish students are able to learn in an environment free from intimidation on college campuses given the budget proposes to decrease the office of civil rights.
Education secretary, Linda McMahon, says actions taken on Columbia University and also Harvard illustrate that the administration “will not tolerate antisemitism on campuses or discrimination of any kind”. Those actions include moves to prevent encampments and mask-wearing (a reference to pro-Palestine protests last year).
“We are actively enforcing that and we have defunded [programs at Columbia and Harvard,” McMahon says. “We’re saying we mean business.”
