Elon Musk says he can slash federal spending. What does that mean? Five things to know.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : The top three line items in the budget are Medicare ($1.8 trillion), Social Security ($1.4 trillion) and U.S. defense and national security ($939 billion).
49% : In those appearances, Musk has been talking up a "government efficiency" panel should Trump win back the presidency in the Nov. 5 election.
48% : But Trump said the culprit was a sharp increase in energy costs because of the Biden administration's policies.
45% : But as Vice President Kamala Harris built a lead over Trump in polling after their Sept. 4 debate, Musk became a much more visible player on Team Trump -- and the government budget-cutting panel became a much more talked about proposal.
42% : "Sure, but back to this basic thing that people try to make complicated but it's not, inflation is caused by government overspending.
28% : Trump, however, showed little interest at the time and instead repeated his call to expand drilling to bring down consumer product costs.
24% : Florida congressional Democrats pounced on the proposal, noting it would put Social Security, Medicare, national defense and Veterans Affairs at risk.
20% : Currently, Project 2025 -- a hard-right plan that Trump and his campaign have disavowed -- also seeks a radical reduction in federal spending.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.