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WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he intends to negotiate portions of the "big, beautiful" tax package, expressing unhappiness with some provisions while being pleased with others.
His comments came after entrepreneur Elon Musk criticized the law a day earlier, claiming that it undermines efforts to cut the US budget deficit.
"We will be negotiating that bill, and I'm not happy about some of it, but I'm thrilled about others," Trump told reporters, without directly responding to Musk's worries.
He also emphasized the need of obtaining sufficient Senate support for the bill's approval, saying, "We can't be cutting, you know, we need to get a lot of support."
In an interview with CBS's "Sunday Morning," which aired late Tuesday, Musk said he was "disappointed to see the massive spending bill" because it worsens the budget imbalance and undermines the Department of Government Efficiency.
"I believe that a bill may be either enormous or attractive. But I'm not sure if it can be both," Musk stated during the interview.
The White House aims to send Congress a tiny package as early as next week to formalize Musk's team's cutbacks to federal agency spending, according to a White House person familiar with the idea.
For months, Republican members in the United States Congress have urged the administration to formalize the federal expenditure cuts outlined by DOGE.
Musk, the world's richest billionaire, was nominated by President Trump in February to spearhead his administration's tumultuous federal agency overhaul as chairman of the newly formed Department of agency Efficiency, or DOGE.
The US House of Representatives passed a comprehensive tax and spending plan on Thursday, enacting most of Trump's legislative agenda while adding trillions of dollars to the country's debt.
Trump and his fellow Republicans, who cleared the plan with a single vote, branded it the "big, beautiful bill." It will add around $3.8 trillion to the federal government's $36.2 trillion debt over the next decade, according to the impartial Congressional Budget Office.
The proposal is now being considered by the United States Senate.
A DOGE website that claims to have saved US taxpayers billions of dollars has several inaccuracies and fixes.
