For the first time in a long time, we find ourselves in agreement with Elon Musk, the drug-addled former DOGE commissar who last week left the federal government and now calls President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” budget a “disgusting abomination.”

Musk’s concerns are not the bill’s slashing of important programs, but its bloat, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would add a staggering $2.4 trillion to the deficit. He might have arrived at the right answer through the wrong process, but ultimately we can still welcome his opposition.

Ditto to the ultra-conservative legislators whose worries are not the fact that the budget will massively reduce critical services for their own constituents, condemning a chunk of them to needless suffering and death — a consequence that Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst infamously scoffed at in a recent town hall — but that it spends too much.

Fine, if they want to oppose the bill on that grounds, we’ll take it. At the end of the day, there’s something for everyone to dislike here in a bill that neither saves money — busy as it is with enormous giveaways to the rich, even as it slashes funding for programs ranging from housing assistance to scientific research — nor advance any cogent vision for the future of the country.

Unfortunately, many voters treat this annual congressional budget fight as some distant sideshow that isn’t worth their attention, but we hope that people, those that consider themselves apolitical or don’t read the news much, realize that the consequences of this legislation absolutely will touch them, just as they’ll touch everybody in the country.

Let’s just take some of the discretionary funding as an example: You do not have to personally receive Section 8 or Medicare for the cutting to impact you. You will ultimately pay for worse health outcomes overall, as newly uninsured people end up in emergency rooms. You’ll pay for those who have lost their housing to end up in shelters. One day, it might even be you.

You might not immediately see the effects of slashing funding to research on everything from agriculture to therapeutics, but it will affect your food and your health in long-term and unpredictable ways. All of this in service to no real objective other than taking apart the federal government from within. As we have often noted, there’s no undo button; capacity that is destroyed cannot just be instantly rebuilt once we realize the grave consequences of those decisions.

We are now at the moment when these consequences can and must be avoided. We hope that Democrats will stand united in using all procedural and political tools to combat this mess of a bill, and that some of their colleagues across the aisle will understand that they are headed towards a disaster that their constituents won’t soon forget or forgive.

Many of them are terrified that opposition will result in attacks from Trump and the threat of well-funded primaries by the same moneyed interests that stand the most to gain. Yet they should be as or more concerned about the impact against the people that they have pledged to represent, and how those people will react once the fullness of the bill’s destruction becomes clear. It’s time to have a spine.

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