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A pair of Democrats on Capitol Hill called B.S. on Elon Musk’s promised federal spending cuts and instead offered another plan to President Donald Trump on June 11 that includes cannabis reform.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., in a letter to Trump, said unnecessary federal arrests and detention programs are costing taxpayers billions of dollars and suggested decriminalizing cannabis. The congresswomen highlighted six recommendations to eliminate more than $2 trillion in “wasteful government spending” over the next decade.
Warren and Stansbury pointed out that the federal cannabis prohibition remains despite 24 states legalizing the plant for those 21 years and older. They also told Trump that imprisoning elderly and terminally ill patients who “pose little risk to public safety” or those with minor technical violations of probation and parole makes no sense.
“By ending these practices, the government could save billions of dollars,” they wrote in the seven-page letter, detailing their plan to also crack down on health care profiteering to save roughly $1.5 trillion and to target waste and abuse in the federal tax code to save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years—among other measures.
In 2023, law enforcement officials made more than 217,000 cannabis-related arrests, 84% of which were for possession charges only, according to crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
In comparison, Warren and Stansbury said the White House’s tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, such as businessmen like Musk, will cost U.S. taxpayers $4 trillion over the next decade.
The letter comes in the aftermath of Trump and Musk’s fallout, where the leader of the free world and the richest man on the planet showcased their feud earlier this month on social media.
As Musk leaves his post as Trump’s “special government employee” at the helm of the administration’s made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and returns to the private sector, Warren and Stansbury cited a May 30 Wall Street Journal report that indicated the president recently asked his advisers, “Was it all bullshit?” The question was about Musk’s promises to slash $1 trillion in government spending—a figure that was halved from an original promise to cut $2 trillion.
“The answer is obvious: it was,” Warren and Stansbury wrote. “Mr. Musk’s efforts at DOGE were never truly about cutting waste. Under the guise of streamlining government spending, DOGE pushed reckless policies that gutted essential services and ousted experienced civil servants, all while reducing oversight and increasing profits for Mr. Musk’s companies.”
The congresswomen cited a 44-page memorandum released in April by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). The memo calculated the risk of Trump providing the world’s richest man unprecedented control over the federal government and estimated the legal liability Musk may have avoided through his unelected government takeover.
According to the PSI memo, Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential liability as of January 2025, including $1.2 billion in potential liability as a result of Tesla’s allegedly false or misleading statements about its autopilot and full self-driving features.
“While the $2.37 billion figure represents a credible, conservative estimate, it drastically understates the true benefit Mr. Musk may gain from legal risk avoidance alone as a result of his position in government,” according to the PSI memo, which only tracked potential financial liabilities for 40 of 65 actions Musk and his companies were subject to by 11 federal agencies. Those agencies were targets of funding cuts under DOGE.
Warren and Stansbury claimed in their letter to Trump that DOGE “failed” to identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. Instead, they wrote, DOGE’s actions are now increasing costs and suffering for Americans.
The June 11 letter is similar to a 21-page letter that Warren sent to Musk three days after Trump’s inauguration in late January, providing the DOGE leader with 30 proposals that would cut at least $2 trillion of “wasteful government spending” over the next decade.
“The Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs and Border Patrol continue to raid marijuana businesses and seize marijuana plants, including in states where marijuana is legal,” Warren wrote in January. “These arrests and seizures unnecessarily drain federal resources. DOGE should recommend that [the Department of Justice] and [Department of Homeland Security] conserve resources by deprioritizing costly arrests and other enforcement actions targeting marijuana activity, at least where the activity is legal in the jurisdiction where it occurred.”
The latest letter comes at a time when support for cannabis legalization is at an all-time high, with 70% of U.S. adults favoring federal reform, according to Gallup pollsters.
It also comes as the DOJ’s proposed rule to reclassify cannabis to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act is now more than a year old: The current process has remained dormant since the DEA’s chief administrative law judge granted an interlocutory appeal five months ago.
Trump signaled support for rescheduling during his 2024 campaign, and his nominee to lead the DEA, Terry Cole, said during his April 30 confirmation hearing that picking up the rescheduling process that was initiated under President Joe Biden would be “one of my first priorities.” However, Cole refrained from saying where he stands on the DOJ’s proposal.
For many cannabis business leaders, rescheduling represents the difference between losses and profitability in the form of deducting ordinary business expenses from their federal taxes. Under a Schedule I listing, Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code prevents them from doing so.
As the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, Warren has long backed banking reform for the cannabis industry as well as aligning federal cannabis laws with state reform.
“You should learn from Elon Musk and DOGE’s mistakes, end your attacks on critical federal programs, and instead act on these recommendations,” Warren and Stansbury wrote to Trump.
