The Media Research Center loved Elon Musk’s hack-and-slash work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — until he pointed out that President Trump massive budget bill would add trillions to the deficit. Alex Christy spent a May 28 post being annoyed that this was noticed:
According to a NewsBusters study, ABC, CBS, and NBC’s coverage of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting efforts at DOGE was 97 percent negative, but on Wednesday, their respective morning shows of Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and Today found a strange new respect for Musk’s concerns about the deficit as they used him to undermine the Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by the House.
ABC’s Jay O’Brien began his report by declaring, “President Trump has been adamant he wants Republicans united behind his mega bill full of a laundry list of campaign promises. But one top ally is still not on board this morning, Elon Musk.”
The origin of all three reports was Musk sitting down with CBS Sunday Morning for an interview that will air on June 1. In a clip of that interview, Musk was shown declaring, “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly. Which increases the budget deficit, not decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
Christy then departed from his employer’s Heathering narrative of bashing any conservative who strays even slightly from right-wing orthodoxy to give Musk a pass:
Yes, it is his opinion. Conservatives are allowed to disagree with each other whether deficit reduction or investments in border security and defense should be the priority. What is not okay is for ABC reporters to simply repeat context-free Democratic talking points, which is what O’Brien proceeded to do:
[…]When Musk was running DOGE on a more full time basis, the media did everything they could to portray him as some sort of heartless monster, but now that he is spending more time away from government, his concerns about the Big Beautiful Bill are treated as a perfectly natural response to high deficits because it would undermine Trump’s second-term legacy.
Christy didn’t explain why high deficits are suddenly no longer a right-wing concern.
Still, the MRC tried to defend Musk’s DOGE work. Intern Lucas Escala declared in a May 30 post:
MSNBC’s host of All In, Chris Hayes, got the facts wrong on Thursday as he criticized Elon Musk, who was preparing to make his way out of office. As a special government employee, Musk was granted only 130 days to lead DOGE in rooting out waste and corruption within the government. In that time, Musk has cut an estimated $175 billion in unnecessary spending across the board. However, Hayes asserted that Musk’s step down had nothing to do with the expiration of his work period, but rather being a result of the fact that “No one likes the guy.”
[…]Believe it or not, disagreements are not what defines politics; it is the ability to compromise, the ability to put aside differences with those you disagree with for the greater good, that makes a good politician. As Musk prepared to leave office, President Trump hosted an event and press conference honoring him on Friday, making it apparent that being “wholesale rejected,” as Hayes put it, was far from the main takeaway of Elon Musk’s time with DOGE.
Escala offered no evidence all that cut spending was “unnecessary.” Christy offered a similar take in a May 31 post:
New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.
Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”
Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”
He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.”
At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady.
In fact, Trump has gutted PEPFAR, reportedly causing the deaths of 70,000 people.
Escala returned for another complaint in a June 2 post:
Somehow, CBS had come to the conclusion that they deserved credit for the end of Elon Musk’s time with DOGE. On CBS News Sunday Morning, the complete interview between David Pogue and Elon Musk was finally aired; having generated much media attention from a clip CBS circulated days prior, in which Musk expressed his criticism of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and supposedly led to his ouster.
[…]As much as CBS might like to say their interview forced Musk out of office, even they couldn’t deny the reason he gave: his time as a special government employee had naturally come to an end. Having been given only 130 days to lead DOGE in clearing waste and inefficiency within the government, Musk’s leave was an inevitability.
Despite disagreeing on the Big Beautiful Bill, President Trump and Musk’s relationship did not take the drastic turn that CBS may have hoped it would. At the event Trump hosted Friday in Musk’s honor on his last day in the White House, the President confirmed that this would not be the end of Musk’s time with the administration, saying, “Elon is really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.”
Elon confirmed the sentiment, telling reporters that he would “continue to be visiting here and be a friend and adviser to the President.”
Those don’t really sound like the words of somebody forced out of his position by a president upset with his comment in an interview.
Nicholas Fondacaro devoted his June 4 hate-watch of “The View” to defending Musk:
You would think that an ABC News program like The View would have some sort of journalistic standard they needed to meet, but that clearly wasn’t the case during Wednesday’s episode. In their opening segment flinging crud at Elon Musk, co-host Sunny Hostin claimed he had killed nearly 300,000 children and co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar hinted that he knew how President Trump stole the 2024 presidential election.
Before claiming Musk had the blood of nearly 300,000 children on his hands, Hostin mocked Musk for not cutting as much government spending as he wanted. “[H]e promised to slash $2 trillion from our $7 trillion budget. Then he moved it down to 1 trillion then it turns out he cut about 160 billion, which is about 2.3 percent,” she chided. “So really, he saved our country less than one percent, nothing!”
Without evidence or a citation of a source, Hostin proclaimed that Musk was personally responsible for killing all those kids:
If Fondacaro had watched David Brooks a few days earlier, he would know that the death number came from Boston University. It’s also worth noting that the MRC still believes the 2020 election was stolen from Trump because, supposedly, not enough people knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Fondacaro has never repudiated that conspiracy theory.