Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) criticized Elon Musk on Thursday over false claims he levied against a proposed year-end funding package last month, successfully torpedoing the bill and forcing Congress to scramble to reach a new deal to avert a government shutdown.
"What he said was not true,” Bacon said in an interview on NewsNation. The Hill and NewsNation are both owned by Nexstar Media Group.
“So, for example, Elon Musk put out that we were going to give ourselves a $66,000 pay raise. That was not true. That we’re protecting Liz Cheney. That was not true. That we were going to build a new football stadium in Washington, D.C. That was not true. So, a lot of things he said [were] not true,” the Nebraska Republican explained.
After lawmakers unveiled the bipartisan funding deal last month, Musk launched a daylong campaign against the bill on his social platform X, dismissing it as a big “piece of pork.”
In a flurry of posts, the tech billionaire and close ally of President-elect Trump occasionally shared or amplified misinformation about the bill, includes claims that it would give lawmakers a 40 percent pay raise, block a probe into the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and fund a new football stadium in D.C.
While the bill would have permitted lawmakers to receive a raise for the first time since 2009, the maximum allowable pay bump for January was 3.8 percent, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Despite Musk’s claims about the Jan. 6 committee, the bill made no mention of the riot and only clarified that House data stored elsewhere remain under the control of House rules.
The original funding deal also sought to transfer control of the site of the vacant Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium to the city of D.C. but did not provide any funds for the construction of a new stadium, as Musk suggested.
The RFK Stadium provision ultimately made it into the final deal that passed Congress just hours before a shutdown.
