Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he has advised President Donald Trump to “immediately” deport Elon Musk from the United States.
Bannon, who has been critical of Musk and his work with the Department of Government Efficiency for months, reportedly said on Thursday that he suggested Trump launch an investigation into Elon Musk’s immigration status.
“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon told the New York Times.
On his War Room podcast Thursday, Bannon also strongly rebuked Musk’s lack of delivering on promised evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government.
“Here’s the problem with Elon. It’s very simple. He promised $1 trillion dollars in cuts in waste, fraud, and abuse,” the podcast host said before reprimanding the idea of DOGE cuts coming in the form of the rescissions package.
“All this thing about the rescissions and we’re going to do the first rescissions package — the $9.4 billion. There’s not a line item in there, there’s 11 line items, including $1 billion for NPR. This has been fought. These are programmatic,” Bannon said.
Bannon explained that a programmatic line item is “a program that has been passed in an appropriations bill that’s called a law” and has had establishment Republicans vote against cutting it in years past.
“He told the president of the United States over and over and over again, ‘I got $1 trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse,’” Bannon said of Musk. “Not one penny was ever found, OK. Where’s the fraud in Medicaid, which is ripe for fraud? Never came up with anything. Where’s the fraud at the Pentagon, which is the mack daddy of waste, fraud, and abuse? Not one penny.”
Bannon’s critique comes amid a public fallout between Trump and Musk.
Earlier this week, Musk slammed Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” calling it a “disgusting abomination” for being a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” measure. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the reconciliation bill would add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
When asked about Musk’s comments on Thursday, the president said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was “upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles.” Trump also said that Musk was upset over not having his way with who would lead NASA.
Trump later threatened to revoke Musk’s federal government contracts. Musk quickly replied that SpaceX would “immediately” start decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft.
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Musk also expressed his support for the idea of impeaching Trump and replacing him with Vice President JD Vance.
Amid the fallout, Tesla stock tanked as much as 17% on Thursday.
