President Donald Trump on Friday promised that cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will make their way to Congress to become permanent.

However, with the Senate currently wrestling with the “Big Beautiful Bill” that would make some budgeting changes that sparked internecine Republican warfare before the bill cleared the House, action may not come as soon as some would hope.

The bill was criticized by Musk recently as undercutting the work DOGE performed when it went into federal departments to slash and burn where there was waste and fraud. Trump, however, said that DOGE’s legislative day will come.

“We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent,” Trump said Friday, according to the Washington Times.

“We want to get our great, big, beautiful bill finished and done,” Trump said.

“We put some of this into the bill, but most of it’s going to come later. … It’s hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said.

The president noted that DOGE sliced items Trump wants cut.

“They canceled $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education, and that was just a small section of the Department of Education, $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City. And the landlord never made the kind of money that he made in the last short period of time,” he said.

But as the Senate faces two rounds of cutting — the “Big Beautiful Bill” and its $9.4 billion in cuts, and what DOGE estimates was $157 billion — the deeper cuts are getting pushback.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is among the lawmakers who have said they would not support cutting everything DOGE wanted to ax, according to The Wahington Post.

“I think it depends what’s in it precisely,” Collins said in speaking of the odds a package of DOGE cuts would pass the Senate. .“For example, the $8.3 billion in foreign aid cuts, if that includes the women’s global health initiative as is rumored, if it cuts PEPFAR as it may, I don’t see those passing.”

Collins said everything depends upon what is proposed and the amendment process.

“Until we see precisely what it is, I think it’s really hard to predict,” she said.

Some senators favor going full speed ahead to codify DOGE’s actions, according to Politico.

“It would be a big mistake if we don’t. It’s the one way to make DOGE cuts real,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said.

There’s also another option, Budget Director Russell Vought indicated, according to Axios.

“We have executive tools; we have impoundment,” he said.

Vought argues that the Impoundment Control Act which has been construed as forcing a president to spend what Congress approves is not Constitutional.

If the Trump administration wants to flex that power, it would mean a court battle with Congress.

“I’ve got a real problem with impoundment,” Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said, according to Politico. “That’s like a line-item veto, and I think it’s illegal. That will be a challenge, for sure.”

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