Exposing a crack in the bromance with President Trump, Elon Musk says the impact of his work as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency will be fleeting with the new spending package that Mr. Trump has championed.

Mr. Musk criticized the size of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and claimed DOGE was a “whipping boy” in two new interviews he gave after stepping back from his role in Washington to concentrate on running his companies.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Musk said that cutting the size of the government was a lot harder than he expected. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Mr. Musk said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”

He also complained about how the Department of Government Efficiency is viewed. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Mr. Musk said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

DOGE uncovered many examples of a bloated bureaucracy, but savings have been much smaller than expected. DOGE reports about $170 billion in savings so far. That’s only 8.5 percent of the $2 trillion he hoped to find. 

Even those savings are in jeopardy because of the “big beautiful bill” that is expected to increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. “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,” Mr. Musk said in a separate interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.” “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both.”

Mr. Musk’s comments came ahead of the Senate debate on the spending bill that passed in the House last week by a margin of 215 to 214. There are already conservative Senate Republicans who say they cannot vote for the House bill as written. 

Mr. Musk gave interviews as he got ready for SpaceX’s ninth test flight of his Starship spacecraft. Trading his MAGA gear for an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt, he said he was disappointed with the negative response his companies faced over his work in Washington. “People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool,” Mr. Musk said.

The SpaceX rocket broke apart during its flight but Mr. Musk said it was a “big improvement over last flight.”