WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Billionaire Elon Musk, who has stepped back from his role of slashing US government spending by firing tens of thousands of people, has criticized President Donald Trump’s signature spending bill.

The “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” — which passed in the House of Representatives and now moves to the Senate — would usher into law Trump’s vision for a new “Golden Age,” led by efforts to shrink social safety net programmes to pay for a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts.

But critics say it will decimate health care for the poorest Americans and cause the national debt to balloon.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with CBS News.

An excerpt was aired Tuesday evening with comments that put him at odds with Trump, who tasked Musk with cutting government spending as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The spending bill is the centerpiece of Trump’s domestic policy agenda and could define his second term in the White House.

Independent analysts have warned it would increase the deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.

“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk told CBS News, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.” The full interview will be aired Sunday.

In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, looked back on his work leading the reforms, in which many civil servants lost their jobs with little or no warning.

“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”

Musk announced in late April he was stepping back from government to run his companies again.

He said in May that he did not achieve all his goals with DOGE even though tens of thousands of people were removed from government payrolls and several government departments were gutted or shut down altogether.

Musk told the Post he would keep working with DOGE but focus on upgrading federal government computer systems rather than firing more people.