Billionaire Elon Musk has doubled down on his distaste for President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax and spending cuts bill, hours before it was narrowly cleared in a last night Senate vote.

Senate Republicans on Saturday procedurally advanced the package of tax breaks, spending cuts and bolstered deportation funds before its July Fourth deadline.

The tally, 51-49, came after a tumultuous night with Vice President JD Vance at the Capitol to break a potential tie.

Tense scenes played out in the chamber as voting came to a standstill, dragging on for more than three hours as holdout senators huddled for negotiations, and took private meetings off the floor. In the end, two Republicans opposed the motion to proceed, joining all Democrats.

The billionaire later posted that the bill would be “political suicide”.

Hours before, Mr Musk took to social media to claim the latest draft will “destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country.”

“It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future,” he said of the nearly 1,000-page bill.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO later posted that the bill would be “political suicide for the Republican Party”.

The criticisms reopen a recent fiery conflict between the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency and the administration he recently left.

They also represent yet another headache for Republican Senate leaders who are suing their majorities in Congress to push aside Democratic opposition, but they have run into a series of political and policy setbacks.

Not all Republican politicians are on board with proposals to reduce spending on Medicaid, food stamps and other programs as a way to help cover the cost of extending some $3.8 trillion in Trump tax breaks.

Trump and Musk’s friendship eroded amid disagreements over the bill. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)

This is also not the first time Musk has made his opinions about Mr Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” clear.

Days after he left the federal government last month with a laudatory celebration in the Oval Office, he blasted the bill as “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination”.

“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” Mr Musk wrote on X earlier this month.

In another post, the wealthy GOP donor who had recently forecasted that he’d step back from political donations threatened to fire lawmakers who “betrayed the American people”.

When Mr Trump clapped back to say he was disappointed with Mr Musk, back-and-forth fighting erupted and quickly escalated.

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Mr Musk suggested without evidence that Mr Trump, who spent the first part of the year as one of his closest allies, was mentioned in files related to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr Musk ultimately tried to make nice with the administration, saying he regretted some of his posts that “went too far”.

Mr Trump responded in kind in an interview with The New York Post, saying: “Things like that happen. I don’t blame him for anything.”

It’s unclear how Mr Musk’s latest broadsides will influence the fragile peace he and the president had enjoyed in recent weeks.

Trump and Musk risk mutually assured destruction Photo shows Elon Musk and Donald Trump embrace on a red stage. The US president will have to use the strong negotiating skills he claims to have to reach a ceasefire deal with tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk has spent recent weeks focused on his businesses, and his political influence has waned since he left the administration.

Still, the wealthy businessman poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Mr Trump’s campaign in 2024, demonstrating the impact his money can have if he’s passionate enough about an issue or candidate to restart his political spending.

Though he was silent on Mr Musk, Mr Trump laid on pressure and lashed out strongly at Republican holdouts in the Senate as politicians spent hours during the vote.

He accused Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina of seeking publicity with his no vote and threatened to campaign against the senator’s re-election.

AP

The US president’s sweeping tax cut and spending bill clears first hurdle in the Senate.

The Republican-controlled Senate of the United States has voted to take President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” into the next phase of discussion, making it more likely to pass in the coming days.

The measure, which is Trump’s top legislative goal, passed its first procedural hurdle in a 51 to 49 vote on Saturday, with two Republican senators joining all Democrats in voting against it.

The result came after several hours of negotiation as Republican leaders and Vice President JD Vance sought to persuade last-minute holdouts in a series of closed-door negotiations.

Trump has pushed his party to get the bill passed and on his desk for him to sign into law by July 4, the US’s Independence Day.

He was monitoring the vote from the Oval Office late into the night, according to a senior White House official.

One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said the 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” was released shortly before midnight on Friday, and senators are still attempting to understand exactly what it means.

“One of the clear things in the bill is that it provides a $150bn boost to military spending. It also adds funding for mass deportations and building that border wall. Now, in order to get this money, what has happened is that there are cuts to Medicare, as well as to the Clean Energy funding programme,” he said.

“The other issue is that there are 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats in the Senate. Now all the Democrats are opposed to the bill. That means every single Republican vote will count,” Hanna added.

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The procedural vote on Saturday, which would start a debate on the megabill, began after hours of delay.

It then remained open for more than three hours of standstill as three Republican senators – Thom Tillis, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul – joined Democrats to oppose the legislation.

Three others – Senators Rick Scott, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis – negotiated with Republican leaders into the night in hopes of securing bigger spending cuts.

In the end, Wisconsin Senator Johnson flipped his no vote to yes, leaving only Paul and Tillis opposed among Republicans.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans unveiled the bill “in the dead of night” and are rushing to finish the bill before the public fully knows what is in it.

He immediately forced a full reading of the text in the Senate, which would take an estimated 15 hours.

“Future generations will be saddled with trillions in debt. Debt is abstract, but what does it mean for the average American? Raising your costs, raising your costs to buy a home, raising your costs to buy a car, raising your costs on credit card bills. And why are they doing all this?” he asked.

“Why are they doing the biggest Medicaid cuts in history? Now it’s getting close to a trillion dollars, just in Medicaid alone, all to cut taxes for the ultra-rich and special interests.”

Elon Musk renews criticism

If passed in the Senate, the bill would go back to the House of Representatives for approval, where Republicans can only afford to lose a handful of votes – and are facing stiff opposition from within their own ranks.

Republicans are split on the Medicaid cuts, which will threaten scores of rural hospitals and lead to an estimated 8.6 million Americans being deprived of healthcare.

The spending plan would also roll back many of the tax incentives for renewable energy that were put in place under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

Nonpartisan analysts estimate that a version of Trump’s tax cut and spending bill would add trillions to the $36.2 trillion US government debt. They also say that the bill would pave the way for a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest 10 percent of Americans to the richest.

The bill is unpopular across multiple demographic, age and income groups, according to extensive recent polling.

On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk, with whom Trump had a public falling out this month over his criticism of the bill, again doubled down on his criticism of the draft legislation.

The Tesla and Space X CEO called the package “utterly insane and destructive”.

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“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country,” he wrote on X. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

He later posted that the bill would be “political suicide for the Republican Party.”

After a scramble in the Senate, Republicans voted on Saturday to advance Trump’s signature “big, beautiful” bill, with a 51-49 vote.

Republicans had been divided over the controversial bill, with some rejecting the proposal to cut welfare programmes in order to cover tax breaks, and others demanding deeper cuts.

The key procedural hurdle was cleared hours after the debate opened, with two Republicans, senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, voting with Democrats to block consideration of the measure.

Meanwhile, the tech billionaire Elon Musk again voiced criticism of bill, describing it as “utterly insane and destructive”.

Here are the key stories at a glance:

Catching up? Here’s what happened on 27 June 2025.

WASHINGTON ― The Senate took a big step toward passage of President Donald Trump’s sweeping legislative agenda on Saturday after several key Republican holdouts voted to advance the $4 trillion package that includes tax cuts for the mostly wealthy as well as major cuts to safety net programs.

The vote on the motion to proceed squeaked by in a 51-49 vote, with Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) joining all Democrats against the measure.

Republicans are moving the bill under a special, fast-track process known as budget reconciliation, which only requires 51 votes instead of the usual 60. Trump has said he wants the bill on his desk by the July 4 holiday, and GOP lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are racing to meet his deadline.

After some uncertainty about whether GOP leaders would indeed have the votes to proceed on Saturday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), two holdouts on provisions in the legislation cutting Medicaid, announced they were ready to move forward.

Hawley, who repeatedly argued against cutting Medicaid, cited a $25 billion fund in the bill that will benefit rural hospitals in his state and a one-year delay in imposing some cuts to Medicaid as reasons why he ultimately came around to supporting it.

“I’m going to spend the next however long, trying to make sure that the cuts that we have are successfully delayed and never take place,” Hawley told reporters on Saturday. “You cannot take away health care from working people. And unless this is changed going forward, that is what will happen in coming years.”

The legislation also includes new “work requirements” for nondisabled adults ― the largest Medicaid cut in the program’s history that is estimated to kick millions of Americans off their health insurance plans. All Republicans supported those provisions.

Collins, meanwhile, said her vote to advance the bill on Saturday was made under procedural grounds and did not mean she would ultimately support it on final passage. The Maine Republican, who is up for reelection next year, said she wanted to see “substantial” changes, including to provisions dealing with Medicaid and federal food assistance.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also voted to advance the bill after holding the chamber in suspense for an hour about how she intended to vote. She did so after intense cajoling from Vance and several GOP leaders on the Senate floor.

The Senate’s draft of the bill, which isn’t final and could change, initially included a controversial plan from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to sell over a million acres of public lands across 11 states in the American West. Several GOP senators threatened to vote against the bill in opposition to Lee’s plan, forcing him to ultimately announce that he was pulling the scheme on Saturday evening.

But Tillis, a top Democratic target in next year’s Senate elections, said he couldn’t support Trump’s signature bill due to its negative impact on health care in North Carolina.

“I did my homework on behalf of North Carolinians, and I cannot support this bill in its current form,” Tillis said in a statement. “It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities. This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population.”

Trump responded by attacking the senator, accusing him of grandstanding and threatening to back a primary challenger against him.

“North Carolina will not allow one of their Senators to GRANDSTAND in order to get some publicity for himself, for a possible, but very difficult Re-Election,” the president wrote on his social media website TruthSocial. “Thom Tillis is making a BIG MISTAKE for America, and the Wonderful People of North Carolina!”

“Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis. I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina,” he added.

Paul and Johnson, two conservative deficit hawks, said they weren’t happy with the way the bill would explode the debt over the next 10 years. But Johnson switched his vote from “no” to “aye” late in the night, allowing Republicans to move the bill forward without a tie breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance, who was on hand.

Democrats also lambasted the GOP bill as a giant giveaway to corporate interests, vowing to fight against it every step of the way, even if they have little power to block it if Republicans remain united under the reconciliation process.

That didn’t stop Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) from throwing up roadblocks, however. The New York senator announced that he would force the Senate clerks to read the entire bill in the chamber ― a lengthy process that’s typically waived with bipartisan support ― to give the American public time to digest it fully.

“Republicans won’t tell America what’s in the bill so Democrats are forcing it to be read start to finish on the floor,” Schumer wrote in a post online. “We will be here all night if that’s what it takes to read it.”

The reading of the 940-page bill could take over 15 hours, delaying a vote on final passage. In 2021, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) forced a reading of Democrats’ 600-page American Rescue Plan, which took nearly 11 hours but ultimately didn’t stop its passage.

A final vote on the bill is expected sometime on Monday. It must then get approval from the House, where a group of Republican lawmakers are threatening to vote no due to its cuts to Medicaid and its effect on the deficit.

Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., said in an interview tonight that acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba’s office had been in touch with hers for a week before charges were filed yesterday.

McIver said on MSNBC that Habba tried to get her to admit having done things she didn’t do outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark this month.

“We’ve had a week of back and forth with them, and I will say that I did not waver. You know, I showed up there to do my job, and she wanted me to admit to doing things, all of these different lists of things that she said that I did,” McIver said.

“She wanted me to admit to these things, sign an agreement to them. And I’m not doing that, you know, because it’s not true. I mean, there was a lot of back and forth and just tenseness, you know, all week from her and from her office,” she added.

Habba’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment this evening.

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