Staunch President Donald Trump ally and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he “wanted to pop a bubble,” a MAGA bubble, on his podcast The War Room. And that popping spells trouble for plenty of MAGA initiatives, especially the “codifying” of so-called “DOGE cuts” that Republicans on the Hill, like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), have been promising.
I was just told that we are going to see the first DOGE cuts bill on Monday.
Foreign aid and NPR/CPB on the chopping block.
I have not seen the bill yet, but I’m just passing on what they told me.
Personally I want to pass DOGE cuts every single week until the bloated out of…
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@RepMTG) May 28, 2025
Bannon’s bubble popping essentially says that codifying the work of DOGE and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — as Musk steps away from his “Special Government Employee” role as the de facto head of DOGE in the Trump administration — will be impossible. That’s because, as Bannon flatly declared on War Room: “There are no DOGE cuts.”
Bannon continued: “Let me repeat this and this is not USAID, those are programmatic things. I’m talking about waste and fraud. Where’s the fraud in Medicaid?…Has anybody been turned over to DOJ for fraud?”
BANNON: Let me repeat this: there are no DOGE cuts. USAID was programmatic. Where’s the fraud in Medicaid? Has anybody been turned over to DOJ for fraud?
The problem with Musk, and I said this from the beginning, is he gave false hope to this political class that doesn’t want to… pic.twitter.com/lDgwfZBHj4
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) June 3, 2025
Bannon added: “The problem with Musk, and I said this from the beginning, is he gave false hope to this political class who doesn’t want to cut anything. The reason, if the big beautiful bill got all these problems, and it has some issues, he drove it because he promised a trillion dollars, ladies and gentlemen. One trillion dollars. That got him off the hook. It’s time for everybody to grow up.”
Bannon said: “The recission next week is nine billion dollars, and two billion, folks, for PBS and NPR, give me a break. We didn’t need DOGE for that. We’ve been fighting for that forever.”
Putting things in perspective, Bannon said: “There’s seven billion dollars in there of what? I don’t know, fraud. He committed to the President of the United States one trillion dollars.”
Many MAGA supporters are speaking against Bannon and his take on Musk, who is above reproach for many of his loyal following. As one Musk supporter replied: “Steve is wrong on this one. Agree with many of his points and statements but he’s just wrong here. It’s not @elonmusk who is at fault. It’s our Congress, Senate and DOJ!” Another strong Musk believer accused Bannon of having “Musk Derangement Syndrome.”
Bannon doesn’t like the “big beautiful bill” because it doesn’t cut spending enough and cuts taxes too much to pay for what it spends. Musk, calling the bill an “abomination,” has many of the same convictions about it.
One concise comment that seemed to largely represent the overall reaction to Bannon was this: “Most of us like Musk more than the weak, do-nothing Republicans in Congress.” If the bill that Mike Johnson pushed through the House is really the problem, Bannon and Musk might be said to be popping very similar MAGA budget bubbles.