reSee.it - Related Post Feed
@TPostMillennial - The Post Millennial
Dan Bongino @dbongino offers a heartfelt thank you to @elonmusk, and says that "he has done a service to this country" by buying Twitter and exposing censorship and collusion within the company. https://t.co/QAk6knjnlQ
Video Transcript AI Summary
Elon Musk stated the media is complicit and lied to the American public, spending minimal time on the story of election interference. He admitted Twitter acted as a propaganda arm of the Democratic party. Congress should demand transparency from Meta, Facebook, Google, Apple, and YouTube.
Regardless of the financial outcome for Musk, he has done a service to the country by exposing how big tech will operate moving forward. The press colluded to interfere in the 2020 election, particularly regarding the Hunter Biden story. This was malfeasance, active collusion between the FBI, DHS, DNI, FEC, Twitter, and big tech, to steal the country. Republicans in Congress need to act.
To win future elections, Republicans need open platforms like Twitter and Facebook, not just Fox News. There is relentless targeting, including Facebook fact-checking, Google banning, YouTube banning, and Twitter shadow banning.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Let's go back to Elon Musk, and let's go back to his words here. And he said the media is complicit, and they were lying to the American public. They spent a total of seven seconds this weekend on the Sunday programs talking about this huge, story that broke last Friday, or Elon Musk himself saying, if you shut down dissenting voices, it is by its very definition election interference. He even admitted that the that Twitter was acting as the propaganda arm of the Democratic party in this election. Election interference.
Now we're not even including Meta or Facebook or Zuckerberg. We're not including Google. We're not including Apple. We're not including YouTube. And I think that congress needs to demand that they become as transparent as as Elon Musk has become here, and I give him a lot of credit for this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Listen. To Elon Musk, I don't know if you're watching or not, but, if you see it later, just a heartfelt thank you. You know, I I I was talking to our good friend Mark Levin before and his great radio show.
Speaker 2: And Mark said the same thing. Regardless yeah. Thank you, Ray. You know, Sean, regardless of what happened By
Speaker 0: the way, I look forward. Dan, you gotta love Mark. He's the best guest. He's the only one that tells you, That's it. I'm done.
Go ahead. I I know he hired
Speaker 2: a well, when he's when you're when you're called the great one,
Speaker 1: you can do that kind of stuff. That's why.
Speaker 2: You know? Defer to Mark. But with Elon Musk, you know, well, regardless of what happens, he may lose legitimately may lose billions of dollars on this acquisition. I don't think he will. I think he's a creative guy, and I think he's gonna build this thing out to be something special.
But he has done a service to this country. He he has literally, not figuratively, changed the history of, I think, how big tech is gonna operate moving forward. He's exposed one key point. I want the audience to understand this. That what the press did to collude and interfere in and potentially fleece the twenty twenty election away from Donald Trump based on the pay based on solid data, a polling taken afterwards about how people would have voted if they would have known about the Hunter Biden story.
We're not getting into any other stuff. I'm talking strictly about that. The media intentionally did that, Sean. This is my point. This wasn't misfeasance.
Right? Misfeasance is different. You see someone trip on the sidewalk in front of you. You don't help them. That's misfeasance.
That's not what this was. This was malfeasance. A guy trips on the sidewalk in front of you, and you kick him in the teeth as he's getting up. They did this on purpose. This was active collusion between the FBI, people in the DHS, the DNI, people at the FEC who'd heard about this stuff, Twitter and big tech to steal away your country.
And you know what? Listen to me, folks. They did it. And Elon Musk is trying to help you get it back to the Republicans in congress who now are about to take over in January. You better grow some moose nuts, and you better do something about this, or we're not gonna have a damn country left.
This is the public square. I love Fox News, and I love working here. But, Sean, even though we have the biggest shows in prime time, it's still just a small population of America. We cannot win an election in the future with just Fox News. You need Twitter to be open.
You need Facebook to be open. You need these other platforms. It's why I put my money behind these other things too because like you said, I'm trying to build this parallel economy out. Maybe that's why I'm public enemy number one to these guys, Sean. I don't know.
But I'm telling you, I promise the audience, don't whine about it every day on my show because I'm not a snowflake. You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. With Facebook fact checking my page over nonsense, Google banning us, YouTube banning us, Twitter shadow banning us, this it's relentless. It never stops. They have put a target on my back for a long time now.
Speaker 0: And that it's because you're effective. That's why. I got off this platform myself. My my staff uses it because I just got sick of it. Dan Bongino, thank you, and we appreciate you joining us.
Alright.
@giftgab538 - 🔥🔎🌟GIFT OF THE GAB🌟🔍🔥
@elonmusk #Elonmusk #Grok #TuckerCarlson Agreed! 💯👍 ⬇️ https://t.co/lIxnOy2io1
@KimDotcom - Kim Dotcom
@TuckerCarlson I’m grateful for the stupidity of Rupert Murdoch, the wisdom of Elon Musk and the courage of Tucker Carlson that resulted in the most important interview of our time. I’m looking forward to watching it.
@JohnStrandUSA - John Strand
This is progress. This is power. This is truly moving America forward. This is the future—and President @realDonaldTrump + @elonmusk are leading us there. https://t.co/BaNUZHuE1M
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker is anticipating something, possibly a visitor. There's excitement and anticipation as they watch for green lights. The speaker notes that it's going to get loud. There's a sense of disbelief and awe as the event unfolds. The speaker exclaims "Holy shit," "What the fuck, baby?" and "Goddamn." They repeatedly say "No freaking way" while looking at "that thing."
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Here we go. Well, there it comes. Wow. Well, let's see if green lights. Green lights would be I can see it's Oh, yes.
Yes. The visitor will get real it's gonna go quite loud bearing with your coming here soon. It's working. Public fuck. Holy shit.
Come on. We're there. Holy shit. What the fuck, baby? Goddamn.
Fuck. Look at that thing. No freaking way. No freaking way. No freaking way.
@Sassafrass_84 - Sassafrass84
Another reason why he won. The level of transparency is wild. He is incredible. This man is a legend, and I'm proud I voted for him 3 times. We are back on track America. https://t.co/SileZxEo9R
Video Transcript AI Summary
Thank you all for being here. From India to California, I pursued my dream of becoming a scientist.
There’s a lot to discuss, including the impact of childhood experiences and current issues like border security and inflation.
Donald Trump is often seen as unserious, and the consequences of political actions are significant. It’s important to highlight how some individuals, like Cindy, have been involved in controversial actions, including paying bail for violent offenders.
There’s also misinformation surrounding Project 2025, which I have no connection to, despite claims to the contrary.
Let’s focus on the facts and the real issues at hand.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Is she crazy?
Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you so very much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Oh,
Speaker 1: too many. Thank you. It's about 20. I've that must be 35.
Speaker 0: Oh, sure. From India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist.
Speaker 1: How many people are watching?
Speaker 0: Can we tell how many Dan? How many people are watching?
Speaker 1: She's talking about how great Santa's sister was before she destroyed it. A lot of talk about childhood. We've gotta get to the border, inflation in Toronto, and take Cindy's out. The things of which she complains, the things of which she of which
Speaker 0: In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. Oh,
Speaker 1: you hear that, Phil? The consequences. It's great. What the consequences are all started by her and Biden against their political opponents. Me.
You get that out right away, John. She paid and raised bail. She paid bail to get the violent Yeah. Briars of Minnesota out of jail. To the top of this with the nonvolatile we love it.
The matches. Put it in there. Put it right in with the put it in there. Put it right in with the second. With that whole shit.
You will be in Yeah. Now. You could do it either that or separate.
Speaker 0: The state of lying about this project 2020 5.
Speaker 1: Oh, lying against project 25, which he knows and so do all Democrats that I have not that I have absolutely nothing to do with. She says we all know that.
@elonmusk - Elon Musk
Thanks
@RealAlexJones - Alex Jones
DOGE Bombshell! Elon Musk and President Trump CAUGHT By The Democrats Launching Operation BIG BALLS!!! Weeding Out Government Corruption Has Never Been So Much Fun! Alex Jones Is Breaking It All Down Here: https://t.co/mgceKv3fXX
Video Transcript AI Summary
We're now 17 days into President Trump's term. There's been a humorous leak in the media regarding a member of Elon Musk's Doge team, nicknamed "Big Balls." This 19-year-old, who has founded several companies, including one called Tesla.sexy LLC, is now working with Musk. The media's serious coverage of this nickname is quite comedic.
In other news, our top-selling product, concentrated Irish sea moss, has sold out at AlexJonesStore.com. However, you can still find it and other products at realalexjones.com, which shares inventory from the same warehouse. These products are designed to empower and enhance your health while supporting our operation. Check them out!
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Everybody We are seventeen days. Twenty three hours forty four seconds into the new presidency of president Trump.
Speaker 1: Everybody said I've got great balls on fire. I
Speaker 0: And now it has come out big bones. That they've been leaking and doxing in the corporate media, different members of Elon Musk's Doge team, and one of them has the nickname big balls, and they're all over the corporate media reporting it all very, very seriously. This is some of the greatest unintentional comedy ever. Here's a club.
Speaker 2: This is a 19 year old high school graduate, who has used, the unfortunate nickname, Big Balls online, so that would be one way that we could refer to him. He is now working at Musk's behest, inside Doge, and we looked into his background. And so we found, you know, several notable things, Erin. One of which, is that this individual has founded multiple companies, including one, with another unfortunate name, Tesla dot sexy LLC, which he established in 2021. He would have been around 16 years old.
Now this LLC controls dozens of web domains.
Speaker 0: Wow. Sexy. Shoes on Tesla. Drag queen story time is a bit of pedophiles, little kids is okay. And, you know, little kids giving male strippers money, three year olds, that's okay.
But if you call yourself sexy Tesla, that is unfortunate. And this person registered some domain names years ago. Woah, man. You talk about dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty people. This is just incredible.
Speaker 1: She's got big balls.
Speaker 0: No one elected big balls. Personally, I voted for big balls. You want my snacks?
Speaker 1: Oh, the
Speaker 0: best part about this is it's so much fun.
Speaker 1: My balls are always bouncing to the left and to the right. It's my belief that my big ball should be held overnight.
Speaker 0: My fellow patriots, I've got some bad news for you. I've also got some good news. Our number one all time best selling product at the AlexJonesstore.com has sold out. The concentrated Irish sea moss, we call it ultimate sea moss because it's the strongest, most concentrated out there, the superfood. It has sold out.
But there is a clone of the site with our same sponsor that runs it, and it has its own inventory right of the same warehouse in Arkansas. That is realalexjones.com. So not just the CMOS that's not available at the Alex Jones store, but some of the other products that are sold out as well are still available at realalexjones.com. They're incredible products. They empower you, make you healthier, and they fund our operation.
So if you love these products, which I know a lot of you do, or if you haven't tried these products, go now to realalexjones.com and find out how amazing these products are.
@MichelleMaxwell - Michelle Maxwell
I don’t understand why all Americans aren’t rejoicing in finally knowing how our tax dollars are being spent. Are you glad DOGE is shining a light? https://t.co/5ycjSMmUy1
Video Transcript AI Summary
Doge's government transparency initiative is an accountant's dream. For the first time, we're seeing exactly where our tax dollars are going, and it's shocking. We've always been told what people *wanted* to hear, not necessarily what we *needed* to hear. Now we have the documentation to see the reality. I'm baffled by the lack of public outrage. This is our money, earned through a lifetime of paying taxes. Where our money is being spent is unacceptable. I'm astounded by the misuse of funds. We need to understand where our tax dollars are being allocated.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Y'all. Doge is an accountant's biggest dream to go into the government and go through every single piece of dollar and tell the American people where it's going. I this is commendable. From an accountant standpoint, I'm like, nobody has ever told us where our tax dollars were going. They told us what we wanted to hear.
They didn't necessarily tell us what we needed to hear. And now that we're in this position to where they're telling us what we need to hear and me just viewing the documentation and seeing where this money has been going, I don't understand why people aren't outraged. This is our money. We spend our life paying taxes, and this is where they decide to spend it? We're dead, Carlos.
@elonmusk - Elon Musk
🇺🇸🇺🇸
@RealAmVoice - Real America's Voice (RAV)
“THE PUBLIC VOTER FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP, THE PEOPLE VOTED FOR MAJOR GOVERNMENT REFORM, AND THAT’S WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GET.” - @elonmusk responds to criticism of how he is running DOGE. President @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/UG9iWlFBWs
Video Transcript AI Summary
My critics, including many Democrats, accuse me of orchestrating a hostile, non-transparent government takeover. However, the public clearly voted for major government reform, which is exactly what they'll get. We're committed to transparency; our actions are posted on X and our website. We're implementing simple, basic checks and balances to ensure taxpayer money is used responsibly and correctly categorized. This isn't about individual judgment calls; it's about systemic improvements. Concerns about conflicts of interest, particularly regarding my past federal contracts, are addressed through our commitment to transparency and the implemented checks and balances. All our actions are public.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Your detractors, mister Muskelet I've what? Including a lot of Democrats.
Speaker 1: I have detractors? You do, sir. I don't believe it.
Speaker 0: Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non transparent way. What's your response to that criticism?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from from the public. The public voted, you know, that we we do have a majority of the public vote voting for president Trump, won the house, won the senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign.
The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for for major government reform, and that's what people are gonna get. They're gonna get what they voted for. And and a lot of times that, you know, people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are gonna get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about.
Speaker 0: Mister Vasquez, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well,
Speaker 1: we we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions we post our actions to the the Doge handle, on x, and to the the Doge website. So all of our actions, which are are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been I I don't know the case that where where, an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. K.
And and so, you know and and the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic. They're they're not we're we're you know, what I mentioned, for for example, about treasury, just making sure that that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the that the the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which are takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid. These these are these are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that taxpayer money is spread well. So it's got nothing to do with, like, say, a contract with some company of mine at all.
Speaker 0: But if there is a conflict in of interest when it comes to you, yourself, for instance, you've received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into Yeah. Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any sort of accountability check and balance in place that would provide any transparency for the American people? Well, all of our actions are are, sec.
@AutismCapital - Autism Capital 🧩
🚨BREAKING: Full Elon Musk x Trump DOGE Executive Order Signing Event / Press Conference (30 minutes) https://t.co/k2XW9lItq6
Video Transcript AI Summary
Our administration's primary goal is restoring democracy by fixing the broken feedback loop between the people and the government. An out-of-control, unelected bureaucracy holds excessive power, undermining the will of the people. We must also address the massive national deficit; its interest payments alone surpass the defense budget. We're finding shocking waste, fraud, and abuse—billions of dollars in improper payments, often lacking basic oversight. Simple controls like payment categorization and verification would drastically reduce this. We're working with agency heads and the President to implement common-sense reforms, increasing transparency and ensuring taxpayer money is spent responsibly. We are committed to fiscal responsibility and economic growth, benefiting all Americans. While we strive for transparency, mistakes will be made, but we will correct them promptly.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So the, at a at a high level, if you say what is the goal of those or or and and I think a significant part of this of our presidency is to restore, democracy. This may seem like, well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback loop, okay, we'd have to if you if you sorry.
Speaker 1: So I tell
Speaker 0: you gravitas can be difficult sometimes. So, if if there's not a good feedback loop from the people to to to the government, and if if you have rule of the the bureaucrat if the bureaucracy is in charge, and then then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the in the form of the president and and the senate and the house, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it's incredibly important that we close that feedback loop.
We fix that feedback loop and that the public, the public's elected representatives, the president, the house, and the senate decide what happens as opposed to an a large unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there aren't some good there are good people who who are in the federal bureaucracy, but but you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people. That's the whole point of a democracy. And so
Speaker 2: and if you if you looked at this if you asked looked
Speaker 0: at founders today and said, what do you think of the way things have turned out? Or We have
Speaker 3: this
Speaker 0: unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of of government, which which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. And this is, this is not something that people want. And it's it's not it does not match the will of the people. So it's just something we've gotta we gotta fix. And then we also gotta address the the deficit.
So we've got a a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit. And if this if we don't do something about this deficit, country's going bankrupt. I mean, it's it's really astounding that the, the interest payments alone on national debt exceed the defense department budget, which is shocking because we've got a lot we spend a lot of money on defense. But and and if that just keeps going, we're essentially gonna back up the country. So what what I really wanna say is, like, it's not optional for us to sit to reduce the federal expenses.
It's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country, and it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt.
Speaker 1: And also, could you mention some of the things that your team has found? Some of the crazy numbers including the woman that walked away with about 30,000,000, etcetera?
Speaker 0: Well, we we we are we do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there there are quite a few, people in in in bureaucracy who who have a ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth, while they are in that position, which is, you know, what what happened to USAID. We're just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they're very good at investing. They, in which case, we should take their investment advice, perhaps. But, just there seems to be mysteriously they cut they get wealthy.
We don't know why. Where did it come from? And, I think the reality is that they're getting wealthy at taxpayer expense. That's that's the that's the honest truth of it. So, you know, we're looking at, say, we we we would just if you look at, say, say, treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if it if a payment is on the do not pay list, that you don't actually pay it.
None of those things are true currently. So the reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building. So you can't reconcile blank checks. You've got common fields that are also blank, so you don't know why the payment was made.
And then we've got this truly absurd, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on a do not pay list. And and this we're talking about terrorist organizations. We're talking about, known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation. It can take up to a year to get on the list. And even what's on the list, the list is not used.
It's mind blowing.
Speaker 2: So so what what we're talking here, we're
Speaker 0: we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that that haven't been present. So you say, like, well, how could such a thing arise? That's that seems that seems crazy. The when you understand that that, really, everything is geared towards complaint minimization, so that that then you understand the motivations. So if people receive money, they don't complain, obviously.
But if people don't receive money, they do complain. And and the fraudsters complain the loudest and and the fastest. So, then when you understand that, then then it makes sense. Oh, that's why everything just they approve all the payments at treasury. Because if you approve all the payments, you don't you don't get complaints.
But now now we're saying that, no. Actually, we we are gonna complain. If if money is spent badly, if the if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible approval manner, then that's not okay. Your your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on the things that matter to the people. I mean, these things like, it's just common sense.
It's not it's it's it's not draconian or radical, I think. It's it's really just saying, let's look at each each of the expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of people? And if it is, it's approved. If it's not, we should think about it. So, you know, there's crazy things like just cross examination of Social Security.
And we've got people in there that are 50 years old. Now do you know anyone a hundred and 50? I don't know. Okay. This they should be on the Guinness Book of World Records.
They're missing out. So, you know, that's the case where, like, I think they're probably dead. It's my guess. Or or they should be very famous. One of the two.
And then there's a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there's no identifying identifying information. Well, like, why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we wanna make we wanna make sure that people who deserve, to receive Social Security do receive it, and that they receive it quickly and accurately. Also, another another crazy thing. So, you know, one of the things is, like, we're we're trying to sort of right size the the federal bureaucracy just to make sure this obviously, needs to there needs to
Speaker 2: be a lot of people working for federal government, but not
Speaker 0: as many as as currently. So we're saying, well, okay. Well, let's if if people can retire, you know, with full benefit benefits, everything, that that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything. And then we were told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we were told the the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.
We're like, woah. Why why why is that? Well, because all the all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine. And, like, what do you mean a mine?
Like, yeah. There's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork that look and you look at pictures at a picture of this mine. We'll post some pictures afterwards. And this this mine looks like something out of the fifties because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp.
And then the the speed the the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal federal government. And the elevator breaks down and then sometimes, and then you can't nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy? There's, like, a thousand people that work on this. So I think if if we take those people and say, like, you know what?
Instead of working in a in a mine shaft and, carrying Manila envelopes to, you know, boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else, and you you would add to the the goods and services of The United States, in in a more useful way. So anyway so I think, you know, that's an example. Like, at a high level, if you could say, like, how do we increase prosperity is we get people to do to to to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that that there's a higher standard of living available for everyone. That's that's the actual goal.
Everyone's very quiet, brother. I said you don't have to nobody is quiet?
Speaker 2: You're detractors, mister Moskovic. I have
Speaker 4: to what?
Speaker 2: Including a lot of Democrats.
Speaker 0: I have detractors? You do, sir. I don't believe it.
Speaker 2: Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non transparent way. What's your response to that, criticism?
Speaker 0: Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from from the public. The public voted, you know, we we have a majority of the public vote voting for president Trump, won the house, won the senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign.
The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for for major government reform, and that's what people are gonna get. They're gonna get what they voted for. And and a lot of times that, you know, people that don't get what they voted for. But in this presidency, they are gonna get what they voted for.
And that's what democracy is all about.
Speaker 4: Mister Busk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well,
Speaker 0: we we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions we post our actions to the the Doge handle, on x, and to the the Doge website. So all of our actions, which are are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been I I don't know of a case that where where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And and so, you know, and the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic.
They're they're not we're you know, what I mentioned, for example, about treasury, just making sure that that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out is categorized correctly, that the that the the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which are takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid. These these are these are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that taxpayer money is spent well. So it's got nice to do with, like, say, a contract with some company of mine at all.
Speaker 4: But if there is a conflict in of interest when it comes to you yourself, for instance, you've received billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Speaker 3: When it comes
Speaker 4: to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any sort of accountability check and balance in place that would provide any transparency for the American people?
Speaker 0: Well, all of our actions are are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, like, wait a second. Hey. You know what? That doesn't that seems like maybe that's, you know, that there's a conflict there.
I I I felt like people are gonna be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately.
Speaker 4: Including you and yourself.
Speaker 0: Yes. But it transparency is what builds trust. Not simply somebody asserting trust. So not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency so you can see everything that's going on. And then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not?
It's totally obvious.
Speaker 1: And if we thought that we would not let him do that segment or look in that area. If we thought there was a, lack of transparency or a conflict of interest. And, we watch that also. He's he's a big businessman. He's a successful guy.
That's why we want him doing this. We don't want a an unsuccessful guy doing this. Now one thing also that, Elon hasn't really mentioned are the groups of people that are getting some of these payments. They're ridiculous. And we're talking about billions of dollars that we've already found.
We found fraud and abuse. I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use. But in this case, fraud and abuse. It's abusive because most of these things are virtually made up or certainly money shouldn't be sent to. And you know what I'm talking about.
It's crazy. So, but we're talking about, tens of billions of dollars that we've already found. And now a judge is an activist judge, wants to try and stop us from doing this. Why? And why would they wanna do that?
I campaigned on this. I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt, and it is very corrupt. It's very, very, it's also foolish. As an example, a man has a contract for three months, and the contract ends, but they keep paying him for the next twenty years, you know, because nobody ends a contract. You get
Speaker 3: a lot of that. You have a
Speaker 1: contract that's a three a three month contract. Now normally, if you're in a small it's in in all fairness, it's the size of this thing is so big.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But if you have a contract and you're in a regular business, you end the contract in three months, you know it's a consult. Here's a contract for three months, but it goes on for twenty years. And the guy doesn't say that he got money for twenty years. You know? They don't say it.
They just keep getting checks month after month. And you have various things like that. And even much worse than that, actually, much worse. And I guess you call that incompetence maybe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It could be corruption. It could be a deal's made on both sides. You know, where I guess the money he kicks I think he has a lot of kickback here. I see a lot of kickback here.
Speaker 0: There's a lot of kickback.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Tremendous kickback because nobody could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts. So he has to get a kickback. So, that's what I got elected for. That and borders and military and a lot of things, but this is a big part of it.
And I hope that the court system is gonna allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to to, among other things, crimes, all of this fraud, abuse, all of this this horrible stuff going on. And we've already found billions of dollars, not like a little bit, billions, many billions of dollars. And when you get down to it, it's gonna be probably close to a trillion dollars. It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're gonna find.
That will have a quite an impact on the budget. And and you'll go to a judge where they handpick a judge and he has certain leanings. I'm not knocking anybody for that, but he has certain leanings. And he wants us to stop looking. How do you stop looking?
I mean, we've already found it. We have a case in New York where a hotel has paid $59,000,000 50 9 million because of because it's housing migrants, illegal migrants. All illegal, I believe.
Speaker 0: And and they were being paid twice the normal room rate at a %
Speaker 1: occupancy. Unbelievable. So it's
Speaker 0: a racket.
Speaker 3: Ask a question. If you
Speaker 0: said If if I may sort of just, going for the president's comments, at a at a high level, okay, well, what how how do what what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from 2,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000? And it's really two things, competence and caring. And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half. And and and I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a, you know, a daily proctology exam, basically. My soldiers camp out there.
So it's not like I think I can get away with something. I'll be scrutinized nonstop. And, but with support of the president, we can we can cut the budget deficit in half from 2,000,000,000,000 to one, and then with deregulation, because there's a lot of sort of regulations that don't ultimately serve the public good. We need to free free the builders of America to build. And if we do that, that means, I think, we can get the economic growth to be maybe 4%, maybe 5%.
And that means if you can get get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. There's no inflation in '26. And if the government is not borrowing borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone's mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, any hit their their their student debt, the the monthly payments broke. That's a fantastic scenario for the average American.
I mean, imagine they they go down the grocery aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same. And their and their their, you know, their mortgage, their all their debt payments dropped. How great is that for the average American?
Speaker 1: We had no idea we had no idea we're gonna find this much. And it's open. It's it's not, like, complicated.
Speaker 2: It's It's not simple, which I did.
Speaker 1: It's like a
Speaker 2: lot of work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You can't believe it. A lot of work. A lot of smart people involved. Very, very smart people. But, it's you're talking about anyway, maybe $500,000,000,000.
It's crazy the kind of numbers you're talking about. You know, normally when you're looking at something, you'll find you're looking for one out of a hundred. Here, you're almost reversing it. You look for one that's good.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you can look at the title and you say, why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? And the public gets it. You know, the public gets it. You've seen the polls.
The public is saying, why are we paying all this money? This is for years this has gone on.
Speaker 3: I'm assuming most president Trump, I don't
Speaker 1: Senator Yeah. Go ahead. Wait. Go ahead.
Speaker 3: Senator Rand Paul today said that doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress. Do you agree with that? Is that the plan? I I
Speaker 1: really don't know. I I know this. We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse. If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it'd be it's fine fine with me. I think we'll get the vote.
Although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote. And how could a judge wanna hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this, incompetence? Why would that happen? Why would even congress wanna do that now congress? If if we do need a vote, I think we get a very easy vote because we have a track record now.
We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption. A lot of corruption.
Speaker 4: If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling? Will you comply
Speaker 3: with this?
Speaker 1: Abide by the courts, and then I'll have to appeal it. But then what he's done is he slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. You know, if a person's crooked and they get caught, other people see that and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. So
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The answer is I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and we'll appeal. But appeals take a long time, and I would hope that a judge if you go into a judge and you show them, here's a corrupt situation. We have a check to be sent, but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer?
I would hope a judge would say, don't send it. Give it back to the taxpayer.
Speaker 0: Yeah. If I can add to that, what we're finding is that a bunch of the fraud is not even going to Americans.
Speaker 2: So I think we can all
Speaker 0: agree that if there's gonna be fraud, it should at least go to Americans. But a bunch of the fraud rings that that are operating in in The United States and taking advantage of the federal government, especially in the entitlements programs, are actually foreign fraud rings. They're operating in other countries and actually exporting money to other countries. We should stop that.
Speaker 3: Mister Musk
Speaker 0: And and this is big what big numbers? Talking about a 200,000,000,000 a year. Serious money.
Speaker 3: Missus Musk, you said on x Yeah. That an example of the fraud, that you have cited was $50,000,000 of condoms was sent to Gaza. But after fact check this, apparently, Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements? It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually.
It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were, correct so we can trust what you're saying?
Speaker 0: Well, first of all, some of the things that I say say will be incorrect and and should be corrected. So nobody's gonna bat a thousand. I mean, any you know, we we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, if if the the I'm not sure we should be sending 50,000,000 bells worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.
And that that is really an enormous number of condoms, if you think about it. But, you know, if it if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, okay. That's not as bad, but still, you know, why are we doing that?
Speaker 3: Not too much. Can you talk a little bit about how closely you're working with agency heads as you're directing these cuts? Do they have the how much input do agency heads have when you're making these decisions?
Speaker 0: Yeah. We work closely with the agency heads. And, yeah. So so there there is a there are sort of checks in place. So it's not as I was just going in and doing things willy nilly.
In it's in, partnership with the agency heads. And, and I check really with the president to make sure that, you know, this this this is what the president wants to have happen. So, you know, we we talk almost every day, and and I I, you know, I I double check things to make sure is this something, mister president, do you want us to do this? Well, well, then we'll do it.
Speaker 2: USA USAID has been one of your main targets. Are you concerned at all that some of the cuts or that shutting that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to to The United States?
Speaker 0: Yeah. So that that's an interesting example. So that's something where we work closely with the state department, and, secretary Rubio. And we have, for example, turned on funding for Ebola prevention, and for HIV prevent prevention.
Speaker 2: You left that?
Speaker 0: Yes. Correct. And and and we are we are moving fast, so we all make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly.
Speaker 4: So Do you think that's a worthy cause? USAID?
Speaker 0: I I think that there's some worthy things, but but overall, if you say what was the bang for the buck, I would say it's it was not very good. And there was far too much of what you said I had was doing was influencing influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day.
Speaker 3: I think I just
Speaker 4: have a follow-up to the, the the Pentagon contracts. If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon, and the president's directing you to look into the Department of Defense, is that possible
Speaker 0: to are going to do at at the president's request.
Speaker 4: Does that present a conflict of interest for you?
Speaker 0: No. Because you'd have to look at the individual contract and say first of all, I'm I'm not the one, you know, filing the contract. It's people at SpaceX or someone who will be putting for the contract. And I'd like to say, if if you see any contract where the the where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn't by far the best value of money for the taxpayer, let me know because every one of them was.
Speaker 2: The president said the other day that you might look at treasuries. Could you explain that a little bit? What kind of fraud or and that question goes to both of you. What kind of fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in US treasuries?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I I think you mean the the treasury department as opposed to treasury bills. Or,
Speaker 2: You also reference treasuries on Air Force One
Speaker 1: the other night. Go ahead.
Speaker 0: Well, the as I mentioned earlier, really the the first order of business is to make sure we're actually collecting sorry for this. Although my son might might enjoy this, but he's he's sticking his fingers in my ears and stuff. So it's a bit hot to hear sometimes. Hey. Stop that.
So, no. The stuff we're doing with with the Treasury Department is so basic, that you can't believe it doesn't exist already. So so so, for example, like I mentioned, just making sure that that when a payment goes out, it has to have the payment categorization codes. Like, what type of payment is this? You can't just leave the field blank.
Currently, many payments that the field's left blank. We and you have to describe what's the payment for, some basic rationalization that also is left blank. So this is why, you know, the Pentagon when's the last time the Pentagon passed an audit? I mean, decade ago maybe. I or whatever.
Really? And we wanna just in order to actually pass audits, you have to have financial information that allows you to trace the payments. So, you know, and and and once in a while, the the the the treasury has to test to pause payments, if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. Like, if if a if a company or an organization is on a do not pay list, we should not pay it. I'm sure you would agree.
Like, if it's quite hard to get on that payment, let let me do no pay list. It means that this is someone that is just it's like dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that kind of thing. We should not pay them. But currently, we do, which is crazy. We should stop that.
Speaker 3: We're not gonna buy transactions.
Speaker 1: And by the way, hundreds, thousands of transactions like that. You know, we have a big team. And for the sake of the country, I hope that the person that's in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge are allowed to do the right thing. Namely, make sure everything's honest, legitimate, and competent. But we're looking at just, when you look at USAID, that was that's one.
We're gonna look at the military. We're gonna look at education. They're much bigger areas. But the USAID is really corrupt. I'll tell you, it's corrupt.
It's incompetent and it's really corrupt. And I can't imagine a judge saying, well, it may be corrupt, but you don't have the right. You got elected to look over the country and to, as we say, make America great again, but you don't have the right to go and look and see whether or not things are right that they're paying or that things are honest that they're paying. And nobody can even believe there's other people, law professors, they've been saying, can't how can you take that person's right away? You're supposed to be running the country, but we're not allowed to look at who they're paying it to and what they're paying.
We have massive amounts of fraud that we caught. I think we probably caught way over a lot of billions of dollars already in what? Two weeks?
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's gonna go, to numbers that you're not gonna believe. And, much as I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. And the only way we're gonna catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is gonna say you're not allowed to look for it, that's pretty sad for our country.
It I don't understand how it could even work.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. Ram, can you personally guarantee that
Speaker 1: Which one?
Speaker 4: The buyout program offered to federal workers? Can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid
Speaker 3: through September?
Speaker 1: Money, but, they're getting a good deal. They're getting a big buyout. And what we're trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people. We have office space.
It's occupied by 4%. Nobody showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave him a five year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them, gave him a five year pass that for five years, you don't have to show up to work. And
Speaker 3: and let
Speaker 1: me tell you, this is largely much of this stuff is because of Biden. It's his fault. He allowed this country what he did on our border. What he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with, all of these contracts that have come out. It's it's a very sad day when we look at it.
I can't even believe it. But many contracts just extend and they just keep extending, and there was nobody there to correct it. And, that that cannot be I can't imagine that could be held up by the court. Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn't have the right to go over their books and make sure everything's honest. I mean, how can you have a country?
You can't have anything that way. You can't have a business that way. You can't have a country that way. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.
We'll be at the White House tonight at about 10:00. If you wanna come over, you can say hello to Omar.
Speaker 3: Did you
Speaker 4: guys do anything in return?
Speaker 1: Not much? No. They were very nice. We were treated nicely by Russia, actually. I hope that's the beginning of a re relationship where we can end that war and, millions of people can stop being killed.
They've lost millions of people. They lost in terms of, soldiers, probably 1,500,000 soldiers in a short period of time. We gotta stop that war. And I'm interested primarily from the standpoint of death. We're losing all those soldiers.
And then not American soldiers, the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. But but you're probably talking about a million and a half. I think I think we gotta bring that one to an end. K? Thank you.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. Thank you, Robert. You, Robert.
Speaker 0: Let's go.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Moving. 10:00.
Speaker 3: Ten
Speaker 1: o'clock United Way
@WesternLensman - Western Lensman
LEFT: CNN propaganda hack angrily argues with @ScottJenningsKY that Elon and DOGE are not providing transparency. RIGHT: Scroll of the DOGE 𝕏 account, providing transparency. https://t.co/g3WNMzzvv5
Video Transcript AI Summary
I believe he wants to be transparent, as he says, and the media is watching him closely. I wouldn't fear Congress if I were him, they're looking into things.
However, he hasn't been transparent from the start. Making announcements isn't enough; providing data is crucial. The White House is providing some information, but you may not believe it. Should anyone blindly believe it's true? Do you think kickbacks of tens of billions from USAID are happening?
I believe there's fraud, waste, and abuse, and they might be finding and sharing information about it. But by definition, they're not fully transparent. They should provide data, especially about kickbacks of tens of millions. I agree, data is great. I like announcements and regular reports too.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: I take him at his word that he wants to be transparent, that he invites transparency. Obviously, everybody in the English speaking world media is looking into him every single day. I would have no fear if I were him about congress about congress.
Speaker 1: He hasn't been questions
Speaker 0: and looking into it. I I think I think they are.
Speaker 1: The definition of it is he's not been on the front end of this so far. He's not been transparent. I mean, maybe there may be They are
Speaker 0: making routine announcements about the things they are finding, and they are inviting questions about the things they are finding every single
Speaker 1: day. But but by definition, he's not being transparent. They're not they're they're not providing data for the things that they say that they have found evidence of. They just aren't. There is
Speaker 0: the I mean, the the White House has provided
Speaker 1: You can make announcements, and he also did admit that he actually So you
Speaker 0: just don't believe it? I mean, they they are they are providing information. You just choose not to believe that it's true.
Speaker 1: I don't think I don't think anyone should just believe that it's true. Do you think that people have taken kickbacks of tens of billions of dollars from USAID?
Speaker 0: Here here's what I think.
Speaker 1: Do you believe that?
Speaker 0: I think every year
Speaker 1: No. But don't accuse me of just, like
Speaker 0: I I'm just I'm just asking you. Do you do you believe that there is any level of fraud, waste, fraud, abuse in the No.
Speaker 1: No. No. That's not what you're asking me, and I'm gonna ask the question. Don't accuse me of just, like And
Speaker 0: so and so if you you believe that, do you believe that it's possible that they are finding and producing information about it? Of course.
Speaker 1: That was my question. The question was, by definition, they're not being transparent. My they can continue to be successful.
Speaker 0: What do you want
Speaker 1: them to do? Provide data if they're firing if they're provide data that they have found people everyone would wanna know if someone has received kickbacks to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Speaker 0: I don't disagree with you. I I love the idea of data. I love the announcements. I love them putting out regular reports of whether they're they're not.
@GenFlynn - General Mike Flynn
WTH is really going on inside our government? We’re being completely ripped off by those supposed to help protect our way of life. @elonmusk @DOGE “DOGE says it found nearly untraceable budget line item responsible for $4.7T in payments.” @realDonaldTrump People must be held accountable. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doge-says-found-nearly-untraceable-budget-line-item-responsible-4-7t-payments
DOGE says it found nearly untraceable budget line item responsible for $4.7T in payments
DOGE identified a nearly untraceable code linking payments to the U.S. Treasury to a budget line item, accounting for nearly $4.7 trillion in payments.
foxnews.com
@libsoftiktok - Libs of TikTok
Trump says DOGE already saved over $55 billion in under a month. YUGE https://t.co/2JHkeESpg0
Video Transcript AI Summary
In just under a month, the Department of Government Efficiency has already saved over $55 billion, and this is only the beginning. We're on track to eliminate trillions of dollars in waste, which will lead to significantly lower inflation and interest rates.
This will also result in reduced payments on mortgages, credit cards, and car loans, and a much stronger stock market. I anticipate the stock market performing exceptionally well. Our strategy involves rapidly expanding the economy by significantly reducing the size of the federal government, and this is a crucial step we must take.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: In less than a single month, the Department of Government Efficiency has already saved over 55 this is just a short period of time, $55,000,000,000. And we're just getting started. That's nothing compared to the numbers that you're talking about. Right? We're ending trillions of dollars in waste, and it'll mean much lower inflation, lower interest rates, lower payments on mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and much higher stock markets.
I think the stock market's gonna be great. In other words, we will rapidly grow our economy by dramatically shrinking the federal government, and we have to do it.
@EndWokeness - End Wokeness
This is a must watch. Trump lists off a bunch of insane scams that US taxpayers were funding before DOGE: https://t.co/8CfrKboiQl
Video Transcript AI Summary
Here's a glimpse at some wasteful spending I've uncovered. We're talking $22 billion from HHS for housing and cars for illegal immigrants, and $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Millions more are going towards initiatives like sedentary migrant inclusion, LGBTQI+ promotion in Lesotho, and indigenous empowerment in Central America.
I've also found $8 million allocated to making mice transgender, $32 million for a left-wing propaganda effort in Moldova, and $10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique. There's nearly $2 billion tied to a decarbonization committee, plus millions more for fish monitoring, voter confidence in Liberia, and illegal alien hotel rooms in NYC.
Other questionable expenditures include vegan climate action in Zambia, social change in Uganda, public procurement in Serbia, learning outcomes in Asia, and a record-breaking $101 million in DEI contracts at the Department of Education.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified. $22,000,000,000 from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens. $45,000,000 for diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships in Burma. Forty Million Dollars to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is.
$8,000,000 to promote LGBTQI plus in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. $60,000,000 for indigenous peoples and Afro Colombian empowerment in Central America. 60 Million Dollars. 8 Million Dollars for making mice transgender. This is real.
$32,000,000 for a left wing propaganda operation in Moldova. Ten Million Dollars for male circumcision in Mozambique, Twenty Million Dollars for the Arab Sesame Street in The Middle East. It's a program. $20,000,000 for a program. $1,900,000,000 to recently created decarbonization of homes committee headed up, and we know she's involved.
Just at the last moment, the money was passed over by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her? A $3,500,000 consulting contract for lavish fish monitoring. $1,500,000 for voter confidence in Liberia. Fourteen Million Dollars for social cohesion in Mali.
Fifty Nine Million Dollars for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City. He's a real estate developer. He's done very well. $250,000 to increase vegan local climate action innovation in Zambia. Two Million for social and behavior change in Uganda.
Fourteen Million Dollars for improving public procurement in Serbia. Forty Seven Million Dollars for improving learning outcomes in Asia. Asia is doing very well with learning. You know what we're doing. We should use it ourselves.
And $101,000,000 for DEI contracts at the Department of Education. The most ever paid, nothing even like it. Under the Trump administration, all of these scams, and they are far worse, but I didn't think it was appropriate to talk about
@cb_doge - DogeDesigner
🚨 BREAKING: President Trump thanked Elon Musk for his contributions to DOGE. The crowd erupted in cheers as the President introduced him. TRUMP: "Thank you Elon. He is working very hard. He didn’t need this. We appreciate it.” https://t.co/vGlZoT4JcV
Video Transcript AI Summary
Perhaps you've heard of it. It's headed by Elon Musk, thank you Elon. He's working very hard and he didn't need to do this. We appreciate it. Everybody here appreciates it, even those who don't want to admit it.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Perhaps you've heard of it. Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the Thank you, Elon. He's working very hard. He didn't need this.
He didn't need this. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Everybody here, even this side, appreciates it, I believe. They just don't want to admit that.
@BretBaier - Bret Baier
My interview with the @elonmusk and the @DOGE team tonight on #SpecialReport https://t.co/KKpxEPtu1Z
Video Transcript AI Summary
Doge aims to cut the deficit by $1 trillion by reducing waste and fraud, targeting a 15% reduction in federal spending. Astonishingly, billions are wasted routinely, like a billion-dollar charge for a simple online survey. The goal is to cut $4 billion daily, with success dependent on President Trump's support.
Doge publishes findings on doge.gov for transparency. Congress is kept informed, emphasizing that eliminating waste aligns with the law. A mine in Pennsylvania houses 400 million paper retirement documents, a process from the 1950s, which Doge plans to digitize for faster processing.
Government IT costs $100 billion, maintaining systems over 50 years old. Social Security faces fraud, with 40% of direct deposit change calls being fraudulent. Doge aims to ensure legitimate recipients receive more benefits. There are 15-20 million potentially fraudulent Social Security numbers.
NIH has 27 centers with 700 IT systems that don't connect, and 27 CIOs. Treasury uses one bank account for all federal payments, lacking proper financial controls, leading to $500 billion in annual fraud. There are 4.6 million government credit cards for 2.3 million employees. Small business loans have been given to those under 11 and over 120 years old. Fraudsters exploit system gaps, like claiming benefits for dead people.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Disparate.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having us and doing this. I know there's a lot of interest in this. You know, first, let me start with you, Elon. What are the what are the budgetary savings goals, and and how much do you think you've achieved so far?
Speaker 2: Our our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So, from a nominal deficit of 2,000,000,000,000 to try to cut the deficit in half to 1,000,000,000,000, or looked at it in total federal spending to drop the federal spending from 7,000,000,000,000 to 6,000,000,000,000. We wanna reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by fifth 15%, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not not efficient, and there's a lot of lot of waste and fraud. So, we feel confident that a 15% reduction can can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk to all the guys
Speaker 2: making it better.
Speaker 1: And talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you, what's the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?
Speaker 2: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind blowing. Just we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually. You know, for example, like the simple the simple survey that was literally 10 question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost about $10,000 was the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.
For just the survey? A billion dollars for for a simple online survey. Do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go to nothing.
Speaker 1: It was like a time. You technically are a special government employee, and you're supposed to be a hundred and thirty days. Are you going to continue past that, or do you think that's the what you're gonna do? Or Well, I I
Speaker 2: think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.
Speaker 1: So in that time frame, a hundred and days. And and the process is a report at some point, a hundred
Speaker 2: days or Not really a report. We we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day like that passes, our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4,000,000,000 a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk of the specifics, but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously, lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And he they characterize the approach as this, fire, ready, and then aim. And how do you approach that? How do you respond to that?
Speaker 2: Well, I I do agree that we actually wanna be careful in the cuts. So we want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. And, actually, that is that is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that, which is not to say that we make we don't make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying you someone in baseball's gonna bat a thousand.
That's impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly, and we we move on.
Speaker 1: Some people say this shouldn't take a rocket scientist. Steve Davis, you are a rocket scientist. Used to be. Yeah. Know.
And now, essentially, you're the chief operating officer of Doge, day to day operations. Fair to say?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Part part of the Doge team.
Speaker 1: What so how did you end up here? What's the biggest challenge you see?
Speaker 3: The reason I'm here, which is probably for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the tax payers in the country would agree that in order to have the the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore, the country going not bankrupt is a good thing, that all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do. I think the thing that's special right now is we actually believe there's a chance to succeed, that there's an administration that's supportive, and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. And I think that's given the inspiring mission and given the, nonzero chance of success, it it was worth down.
Speaker 2: I just just like to sort of re upsize that point. The success of those is only possible with president Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.
Speaker 1: But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers. Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bid is often a billion dollars. So for example, the $830,000,000, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money. That wouldn't have been found if the Doge team wasn't working with it, in that case, the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further, Doge then publish publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency.
So now the general public it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log in to doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they're not yet in real time. They're close, but they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.
Speaker 1: But the process still involves congress. Right? At some level?
Speaker 2: We're trying to keep congress as informed as possible, but it it the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly. It should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It's not contrary to congress to avoid waste and fraud. It is consistent with the law and consistent with congress, and we've seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the of the house and occasionally some Democrats too. You know, it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while.
But usually, when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. So they'll they'll say what we're doing is somehow unconstitutional or legal or whatever. We're like, well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can't point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the doge handle on x.
And you'll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.
Speaker 1: Joe Gabbian, besides Elon, you're one of several billionaires here, cofounder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.
Speaker 4: I bumped into Anthony Dewan probably back in February, and they told me something about a a mine that was dealt with retirement. And they said that he needs somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I I love the challenge, I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government. Now picture this.
This this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400,000,000 pieces of paper. It's a process that started in the nineteen fifties and largely hasn't changed in the last seventy years. And so as he dug into it, we found retirement cases that had so much paper, they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months, and we're gonna make it just many days.
Speaker 1: Will it be digitized or how
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: So this will be an
Speaker 4: online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think, you know, it's an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. So we really believe that the government can have an Apple Store like experience, beautifully designed, great, easier experience, modern systems.
Speaker 1: Because right now, it's by hand.
Speaker 2: Yes. The the the retirement process is all by paper, literally with people carrying paper and manila envelopes in into this gigantic mine.
Speaker 1: So they can't retire more than a certain number every month?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: About about 8,000 a month.
Speaker 2: That that that's how we the reason we discovered it was we were saying like, well, let's encourage voluntary retire retirement. That's the most you could be that could they could do is 8,000 a month. And and even don't know what circumstances it can take six to nine months just to just to have your time and paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong. So like, well, why would it take so long to retire? And they're like, well, because of the mind.
You're like, what do mean a mind? What's a mind got to do with retiring? And that's where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done by still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the nineteen fifties. Like, we took a snapshot of the mind when it first started in the fifties to today. It looks the same.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. So how long do you think it'll take take to turn over?
Speaker 4: We're working as fast as we can. Probably next couple of months, we'll have this this overhauled. And, you know, I really think, again, like, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There's a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire. I I think we can do better for them.
Speaker 1: Aram Mogadasi, a Doge engineer. Yeah. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, first people to go into the agencies and view the computer datasets. Tell me what you're finding. And for people who don't understand how that process works, explain it for them.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I'll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically, the state of government computers. By some estimates, government IT costs about a hundred billion dollars, and it's funding systems that are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain, and, they could be the the efforts to improve them are often very delayed.
So I I thought I'm a software engineer, that that maybe could make a difference here, and, that's that's really what inspired me at a high level.
Speaker 1: There's lot of history about Social Security and a lot of words about it from here's what Democrats have been saying about
Speaker 3: It's absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security.
Speaker 0: Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security.
Speaker 1: Their goal is clear, destroy Social Security from within. You're in the building. I mean, you're in the computers. What's happening there? What are you doing?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 0: It doesn't line up with my experience on the ground. And I'll say the two improvements that we're trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better. And I'll give you one one example is at Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.
Speaker 1: Forty percent?
Speaker 0: That's right. Almost half.
Speaker 2: Yes. And and they they steal people's social security is what happens. Is they they call in, they say, they claim to be a retiree, then they they and they convince the post the Social Security person on the phone to change the where the where the money is flowing. It it actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day every day.
And and then and then somebody doesn't receive their Social Security is because of of all the the forward loopholes in the Social Security system.
Speaker 1: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not gonna affect their benefits?
Speaker 2: No. In fact, what what we're doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people, as a result of the work of Doge, will receive more social security, not less. Wanna emphasize that. As a result of the work of Doge, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.
Speaker 1: Alright.
Speaker 2: And and and and let the record show that I said this and the it will be proven out to be true. Let's let's check back on this in the future.
Speaker 1: So it's Washington Post. The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in ten days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. Freaked people out. Is it is that gonna change?
Speaker 2: Yes. We're gonna make sure that the website stays online.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, but is it a result of going in there No. Or something you're doing?
Speaker 3: It's No. No. The the amount of issues that were the social security system are are enormous. As an example, there are over 15,000,000 people that are 20 that are marked as alive in the social security system.
Speaker 1: And that's an accurate figure.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Correct. 15,000,000.
Speaker 3: Correct. This has been something that's been identified as a problem. Again, preexisting problems since February at least from an IG report. So there are some great people working at the social security administration Social Security Administration that found this 02/2008 and nothing was done. And so 15 to 20,000,000 social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.
There'd be no way to use those for good intentions. And so what one of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
Speaker 1: Brett Smith, working at HHS, and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid, NIH. What are you finding?
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, I'd say there's a couple of things we're really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one, making sure we continue to have the best biomedical research in the world. And number two, making sure which president Trump has said over and over again that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid, but there's a lot of opportunity. So if I take NIH as an example, today, if you're an NIH researcher and you get a hundred dollar grant at your university, today, you get to spend 60 of that and your university spends 40 of that.
The policy that we're proposing to make is that you get to spend 85 of that and your university spends 15. So that's more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures. Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers. They got created over time by congress and they're typically by disease state or body system. There's 700 different IT systems today at NIH.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred different IT systems.
Speaker 2: IT software systems. They don't connect.
Speaker 6: They can't speak to each other.
Speaker 1: So they don't talk to one.
Speaker 6: They have 27 different CIOs. And so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.
Speaker 1: Time out. Time out. You said 27 different chief information officers?
Speaker 6: Correct. Correct.
Speaker 2: And most of them are nontechnical.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot there.
Speaker 6: There's a there's a lot of opportunity. It will make science better, not worse.
Speaker 2: And when I say that our job is tech support, I really mean it. Yeah. We have to fix the computers. If the computers can't talk to each other, you can't get research done. If the computers can't go stay online, people won't receive their social security.
So what we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their their benefits, that are preventing people from preventing research from happening, that are, extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we're fixing it.
Speaker 1: And does that include AI? Does that include kind of changing the system overall? That's, I guess, what people are afraid of is they don't know
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What this is all looking like, and is it gonna affect me in the long term?
Speaker 2: It's gonna affect them. It's gonna affect people very positively. So the the changes that we're doing here will ensure the solvency of the American government, of the American of of The United States Of America. This is what this is what we're trying to do is ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the if the if the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.
Speaker 1: Anthony Armstrong, Doge, office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley banker, m and a guy. Yeah. You know money, and this is a lot of money sloshing around.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of money sloshing around. It's a lot of money sloshing out the door. And if you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it's really a one way ratchet over decades.
Speaker 1: You It's only going up.
Speaker 5: It's only going up. You never you never take it away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions. It leaves you with overstaffing, and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places. So a couple of examples, duplicative functions.
Brad mentioned 27 CIOs. If you had kept going with Brad, he probably he would talk about the communications office. I think you've got forty forty distinct communications offices in HHS. Yeah. 40?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's not unusual by by the way. Multiple offices like It's like anyone healthy. This is not about the employees there.
There's many many hardworking, well meaning people who who took jobs. These jobs were out there. They applied for them. They took them. They're doing what's there.
It's just that they're duplicating the effort of 40 offices. So you've got that. You've got over staffing. A good example of over staffing would be the IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. So if you join the IRS, you get a laptop and a cell phone, you're provisioned.
So if each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day, you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year
Speaker 2: 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone.
Speaker 5: Right. The the whole IRS could be handled once a month. So that doesn't that doesn't make any sense. And president Trump's been very clear. It's scalpel, not hatchet, and that's the way it's it's getting done.
And then once those decisions are made, there's a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, being compassionate, and treating everyone with dignity and respect. And and if you look at how people have started to leave the government, it is largely through voluntary means. There's voluntary early retirement. There's voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation, the eight month severance program.
So there's a very heavy bias towards programs that are long dated, that are generous, that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector. And you've you've heard a lot of a lot of news about rifts about people getting fired. At at this moment in time, less than point one five not 1.5, less than point one five of the federal workforce has actually been given a riff notice.
Speaker 1: So So they've selected if they're a leader.
Speaker 2: It it is Basically, almost no one's gotten fired That's what we're saying.
Speaker 1: Tom Krausz, working at treasury, you are having access to the payment system, oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially, payments were going places we didn't know where they were going. Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the case, Brett. You know, as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we're doing is we're applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There is actually really only one bank account that's used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government.
Speaker 1: Time out. One bank account.
Speaker 2: It's a big one.
Speaker 1: It's a
Speaker 3: big one. It's a
Speaker 7: big one. One. A couple weeks ago, had $800,000,000,000 in it, but it's the the treasury general account. So when you hear, you know, some of my colleagues here, what they're talking about in terms of the fraud, you have to ask, well, why is this allowed to happen at a financial level? Well, it's actually quite simple but alarming.
The treasury up until now, and thanks to president Trump, we're fixing this. In fact, there's an executive order that he just signed, the other day, which is protecting America's bank account because it really is the taxpayers' money. One, we're changing the culture. The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what's right relative to financial operations. There's a $500,000,000,000 of fraud every year.
There's hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments, and we can't pass an audit. The the consolidated financial report is produced by treasury, and we cannot pass it on. We have material weaknesses. What that means is that if I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed. I couldn't file financial statements.
I couldn't issue securities. Can't on. Can't it on.
Speaker 2: Right. The the federal government cannot pass an order. It's impossible. In fact, the the in order to pass an order, you need the information necessary to pass an order. You need to have the payment codes.
You need to have the payment explanation, and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory Yeah. Until until just recently, just a few weeks ago. In fact, maybe last week?
Speaker 7: Yeah. We're serving 580 plus agencies. And up until very recently, effectively, they could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible. No verification. And so what we're doing is what any household would do.
But imagine you're a household, you have a bank account, everyone has an ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook connected to that account. It's not just your children. It's not just your parents. It's your in laws. It's your extended family.
And they all can go to the account and disperse funds. No questions asked. No justification. No verification.
Speaker 1: Tyler, Hasson, interior department, you're a form former oil company CEO. You're reviewing contracts before they're approved for funding. What what are you finding?
Speaker 8: Well, Elon and Steve kinda stole my thunder a little bit, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here. I could have done this in high school. And I I found it
Speaker 2: It's that bad.
Speaker 8: I found it on the weekends because under the Biden administration, there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever. None. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single grant. And when things come to my attention that don't make sense, I'm bringing him to secretary Bergam, and he has been fantastic. He's he's a businessman.
He's very supportive of Doge. It's been wonderful
Speaker 2: to work with Is
Speaker 1: the battle between government of decades and decades of buildup and business, which you guys are, is that like a train hitting each other? I mean, it it seems like it's pretty disruptive. Well, this is a revolution.
Speaker 2: And I think it it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution. But at the end of the day, America is gonna be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it's gonna be a fantastic future. And but are we gonna get a lot of complaints along the way?
Absolutely. You know, one the things I learned at PayPal was the you know, who complains the loudest and the with the the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. That's it's a tell. You know these NGOs that are crazy?
Like the the $2,000,000,000 to Stacey Abrams NGO that basically didn't exist and suddenly gets $2,000,000,000 awarded from the federal government. She has why. And there are many such cases like that.
Speaker 1: I think that most people, common sense wise, would say the fraud's gotta end.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They're concerned about the 94 year old mother who skips a check or somehow doesn't get what she's supposed to get.
Speaker 2: Right. And what we're trying to say is actually the that that the 94 year old grandmother is is actually, as a result of Joe Doge's work, going to get her check. She's not going to be robbed by fraudsters like she's getting robbed today. And the solvency of the of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks that Medicare continues to work without which we're all doomed. And the reason we're doing this is because if if we don't do it, America's gonna go insolvent.
We're gonna go bankrupt, and nobody's gonna get anything.
Speaker 1: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean, you can pipe up, but it you don't have to be here. Right? I mean, you don't you don't have to be doing this.
Speaker 7: I have four blessed with four beautiful children, my wife and I, But we have a real fiscal crisis, and and this is not sustainable. And what's worse, back to my children and everyone else's children, is we are burdening them with that debt, and it's only gonna grow.
Speaker 1: Steve, there's not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different, you know, silos, but with the same kind of goal. Right? I mean,
Speaker 3: this is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government. Yeah. Exactly. And we're headed in a bad path, but then the chance of success exists. And just the one that just is in my head right now, which is a fairly mundane one, but I think is very illustrative is credit cards.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: There are in the in the federal government around 4,600,000 credit cards for around 2.3 to 2,400,000 employees. This doesn't make sense. Right. And so one of the things all of the teams have have worked on is we've worked with the agencies and said, do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used?
Can you tell us physically where they are? I hope they're getting frequent flyers. Actually, on a different note, the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good. It costs. That's a whole other It's a negotiation.
Right. Yeah. Exactly. But so far, the teams have worked together, and they've reduced it from 4,600,000.0 to to 4,300,000.0. So So we're taking we're taking it easy.
Speaker 7: Yeah. But but
Speaker 2: clearly, there should not be, you know, more there should be more credit cards than there are people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Joe, middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy? I mean
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I mean, I think what you're seeing is taking the best Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We're bringing the best practices and the best methodologies. And people are inspired, right, especially on the retirement process, which I can speak to. They've been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early two thousands, very unsuccessfully.
Every attempt has gone over budget, and been canceled, because it hasn't been successful. And so, you know, I showed up and I feel like I'm here because it's an interesting problem. We can use design to solve it and good engineering and really create a better experience for everybody.
Speaker 2: They were we're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. So, like, if if these can if if if the federal government if if if a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would be go immediately go bankrupt. It would be delisted. The officers would be arrested. And the changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit.
It will enable enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard earned tax tax dollars are being spent well. But the ways that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other. So if the computer systems systems don't talk to each other, then it you you can you can exploit that gap and and forces exploit that exploit that gap, take advantage. If, for example, there were over $300,000,000 of small business administration loans that has been given out to people under the age of 11.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, to add to this, 300,000,000 under the age of 11 and over three hundred million to over the age of 120.
Speaker 1: Definitely Small business loans.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: The the oldest American is a hundred and 14. So it's safe to say if their age is 15 or above, they're they're fake, or they should be in the Guinness Guinness Book of World Records. And we we should not be giving out loans to babies. So the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a nine month year old, which is a very very cautious baby we're talking about here. So obviously, it was just fraudulent.
And what they and and they do terrible things. They actually will see that a a kid's been born. They will steal that kid's social security number and then take out a loan, and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. There was literally a baby. The terrible things are being done is what we're saying.
And how? We're stopping these terrible things.
Speaker 1: And you can stop it?
Speaker 4: I mean Well, we are stopping
Speaker 2: The reason this is happening
Speaker 5: is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: Right? And so you don't know at the small business administration that you're giving a loan to a nine month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross referencing that with the social security administration data that has birth dates. So that very, very simple fix Yes. Eliminates tremendous fraud. And and that there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another.
And if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised? One of ways
Speaker 2: that like, one one of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is mocked as live and as as sort of just that that Social Security number is mocked as live in Social Security, and then then get disability and unemployment insurance for a dead person. Because the databases don't talk to each other, all they got was from Social Security is like, is this person alive? Yes. They're not they're not alive. It's falsely marked person is falsely marked as alive in social security, but they didn't but but that first a fraudster can now get unemployment and disability for from a dead person.
This is happening all the time at scale.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in? There's about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds. They're being challenged by the DOJ. Right. Are you surprised by that pushback?
Speaker 2: Well, it's the the DC circuit is notorious for having a very far left bias. And when you look at the people close to some of these judges, who who who are where are they working? Are they working at these NGOs? Are they getting the the other ones getting this money? Does that seem like system that lacks corruption?
It sounds like corruption to me.
Speaker 1: Last thing. Do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? I mean, is that really what this is about? It's essential. Very
Speaker 8: much. I do. A %. I I was running five businesses in Houston, and and I left that. I left great people to do this.
And my wonderful wife said, go for it. And here I am. But I I feel like this is me giving back to the country.
Speaker 2: If if we don't do this, we're sunk. The ship unless unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink. That's why we're doing it.
Speaker 1: Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate the time today. And hopefully, it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what's happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
@MonicaCrowley - Monica Crowley
🚨MUST WATCH: This @BretBaier interview with @elonmusk & the @DOGE team is OUTSTANDING 🔥🇺🇸 https://t.co/EJaolneGTN
Video Transcript AI Summary
Doge aims to cut the federal deficit by $1 trillion by reducing waste and fraud, targeting a 15% spending reduction without affecting critical services. Astonishingly, billions are wasted routinely, like a billion-dollar charge for a simple online survey. Doge aims to cut $4 billion daily and publishes findings on doge.gov for transparency.
The team found a mine in Pennsylvania housing 400 million paper retirement documents, a process from the 1950s they plan to digitize for faster processing. Government IT costs $100 billion, maintaining systems over 50 years old. Social Security faces fraud, with 40% of calls being from fraudsters trying to steal benefits. Doge aims to protect legitimate recipients and ensure website stability.
There are 15-20 million potentially fraudulent Social Security numbers in the system. NIH has 27 centers with 700 IT systems that don't connect and 27 CIOs. The federal government has a one-way ratchet workforce, leading to duplicative functions like 40 communications offices at HHS. The IRS has 1,400 people provisioning laptops and cell phones, a task that could be done monthly by a fraction of that staff.
Treasury uses one main bank account for all outgoing payments, lacking basic financial controls and auditability. There's $500 billion in fraud annually. Small business loans were given to those under 11 and over 120 years old due to systems not cross-referencing data. Fraudsters exploit the "alive" status in Social Security to claim benefits for dead people. Doge views its work as a patriotic duty to ensure America's solvency.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Disparate.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having us and doing this. I know there's a lot of interest in this. You know, first, let me start with you, Elon. What are the what are the budgetary savings goals, and and how much do you think you've achieved so far?
Speaker 2: Our our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So, from a nominal deficit of 2,000,000,000,000 to try to cut the deficit in half to 1,000,000,000,000, or looked at it in total federal spending to drop the federal spending from 7,000,000,000,000 to 6,000,000,000,000. We wanna reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by fifth 15%, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not not efficient, and there's a lot of lot of waste and fraud. So, we feel confident that a 15% reduction can can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk to all the guys
Speaker 2: making it better.
Speaker 1: And talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you, what's the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?
Speaker 2: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind blowing. Just we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually. You know, for example, like the simple the simple survey that was literally 10 question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost about $10,000 was the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.
For just the survey? A billion dollars for for a simple online survey. Do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go to nothing.
Speaker 1: It was like a time. You technically are a special government employee, and you're supposed to be a hundred and thirty days. Are you going to continue past that, or do you think that's the what you're gonna do? Or Well, I I
Speaker 2: think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.
Speaker 1: So in that time frame, a hundred and thirty days. And and the process is a report at some point, a hundred
Speaker 2: days or Not really a report. We we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day like that passes, our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4,000,000,000 a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk of the specifics, but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously, lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And he they characterize the approach as this, fire, ready, and then aim. And how do you approach that? How do you respond to that?
Speaker 2: Well, I I do agree that we actually wanna be careful in the cuts. So we want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. And, actually, that is that is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that, which is not to say that we make we don't make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying you someone in baseball's gonna bat a thousand.
That's impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly, and we we move on.
Speaker 1: Some people say this shouldn't take a rocket scientist. Steve Davis, you are a rocket scientist. Used to be. Yeah. Know.
And now, essentially, you're the chief operating officer of Doge, day to day operations. Fair to say?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Part part of the Doge team.
Speaker 1: What so how did you end up here? What's the biggest challenge you see?
Speaker 3: The reason I'm here, which is probably for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the tax payers in the country would agree that in order to have the the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore, the country going not bankrupt is a good thing, that all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do. I think the thing that's special right now is we actually believe there's a chance to succeed, that there's an administration that's supportive, and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. And I think that's given the inspiring mission and given the, nonzero chance of success, it it was worth down.
Speaker 2: I just just like to sort of re upsize that point. The success of those is only possible with president Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.
Speaker 1: But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers. Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bid is often a billion dollars. So for example, the $830,000,000, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money. That wouldn't have been found if the Doge team wasn't working with it, in that case, the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further, Doge then publish publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency.
So now the general public it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log in to doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they're not yet in real time. They're close, but they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.
Speaker 1: But the process still involves congress. Right? At some level?
Speaker 2: We're trying to keep congress as informed as possible, but it it the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly. It should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It's not contrary to congress to avoid waste and fraud. It is consistent with the law and consistent with congress, and we've seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the of the house and occasionally some Democrats too. You know, it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while.
But usually, when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. So they'll they'll say what we're doing is somehow unconstitutional or legal or whatever. We're like, well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can't point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the doge handle on x.
And you'll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.
Speaker 1: Joe Gabbian, besides Elon, you're one of several billionaires here, cofounder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.
Speaker 4: I bumped into Anthony Dewan probably back in February, and they told me something about a a mine that was dealt with retirement. And they said that he needs somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I I love the challenge, I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government. Now picture this.
This this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400,000,000 pieces of paper. It's a process that started in the nineteen fifties and largely hasn't changed in the last seventy years. And so as he dug into it, we found retirement cases that had so much paper, they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months, and we're gonna make it just many days.
Speaker 1: Will it be digitized or how
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: So this will be an
Speaker 4: online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think, you know, it's an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. So we really believe that the government can have an Apple Store like experience, beautifully designed, great, easier experience, modern systems.
Speaker 1: Because right now, it's by hand.
Speaker 2: Yes. The the the retirement process is all by paper, literally with people carrying paper and manila envelopes in into this gigantic mine.
Speaker 1: So they can't retire more than a certain number every month?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: About about 8,000 a month.
Speaker 2: That that that's how we the reason we discovered it was we were saying like, well, let's encourage voluntary retire retirement. That's the most you could be that could they could do is 8,000 a month. And and even don't know what circumstances it can take six to nine months just to just to have your time and paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong. So like, well, why would it take so long to retire? And they're like, well, because of the mind.
You're like, what do mean a mind? What's a mind got to do with retiring? And that's where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done by still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the nineteen fifties. Like, we took a snapshot of the mind when it first started in the fifties to today. It looks the same.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. So how long do you think it'll take take to turn over?
Speaker 4: We're working as fast as we can. Probably next couple of months, we'll have this this overhauled. And, you know, I really think, again, like, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There's a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire. I I think we can do better for them.
Speaker 1: Aram Mogadasi, a Doge engineer. Yeah. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, first people to go into the agencies and view the computer datasets. Tell me what you're finding. And for people who don't understand how that process works, explain it for them.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I'll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically, the state of government computers. By some estimates, government IT costs about a hundred billion dollars, and it's funding systems that are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain, and, they could be the the efforts to improve them are often very delayed.
So I I thought I'm a software engineer, that that maybe could make a difference here, and, that's that's really what inspired me at a high level.
Speaker 1: There's lot of history about Social Security and a lot of words about it from here's what Democrats have been saying about
Speaker 3: It's absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security.
Speaker 0: Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security.
Speaker 1: Their goal is clear, destroy Social Security from within. You're in the building. I mean, you're in the computers. What's happening there? What are you doing?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 0: It doesn't line up with my experience on the ground. And I'll say the two improvements that we're trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better. And I'll give you one one example is at Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.
Speaker 1: Forty percent?
Speaker 0: That's right. Almost half.
Speaker 2: Yes. And and they they steal people's social security is what happens. Is they they call in, they say, they claim to be a retiree, then they they and they convince the post the Social Security person on the phone to change the where the where the money is flowing. It it actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day every day.
And and then and then somebody doesn't receive their Social Security is because of of all the the forward loopholes in the Social Security system.
Speaker 1: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not gonna affect their benefits?
Speaker 2: No. In fact, what what we're doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people, as a result of the work of Doge, will receive more social security, not less. Wanna emphasize that. As a result of the work of Doge, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.
Speaker 1: Alright.
Speaker 2: And and and and let the record show that I said this and the it will be proven out to be true. Let's let's check back on this in the future.
Speaker 1: So it's Washington Post. The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in ten days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. Freaked people out. Is it is that gonna change?
Speaker 2: Yes. We're gonna make sure that the website stays online.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, but is it a result of going in there No. Or something you're doing?
Speaker 3: It's No. No. The the amount of issues that were the social security system are are enormous. As an example, there are over 15,000,000 people that are 20 that are marked as alive in the social security system.
Speaker 1: And that's an accurate figure.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Correct. 15,000,000.
Speaker 3: Correct. This has been something that's been identified as a problem. Again, preexisting problems since February at least from an IG report. So there are some great people working at the social security administration Social Security Administration that found this 02/2008 and nothing was done. And so fifteen to twenty million social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.
There'd be no way to use those for good intentions. And so what one of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
Speaker 1: Brett Smith, working at HHS, and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid, NIH. What are you finding?
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, I'd say there's a couple of things we're really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one, making sure we continue to have the best biomedical research in the world. And number two, making sure which president Trump has said over and over again that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid, but there's a lot of opportunity. So if I take NIH as an example, today, if you're an NIH researcher and you get a hundred dollar grant at your university, today, you get to spend 60 of that and your university spends 40 of that.
The policy that we're proposing to make is that you get to spend 85 of that and your university spends 15. So that's more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures. Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers. They got created over time by congress and they're typically by disease state or body system. There's 700 different IT systems today at NIH.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred different IT systems.
Speaker 2: IT software systems. They don't connect.
Speaker 6: They can't speak to each other.
Speaker 1: So they don't talk to one.
Speaker 6: They have 27 different CIOs. And so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.
Speaker 1: Time out. Time out. You said 27 different chief information officers?
Speaker 6: Correct. Correct.
Speaker 2: And most of them are nontechnical.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot there.
Speaker 6: There's a there's a lot of opportunity. It will make science better, not worse.
Speaker 2: And when I say that our job is tech support, I really mean it. Yeah. We have to fix the computers. If the computers can't talk to each other, you can't get research done. If the computers can't go stay online, people won't receive their social security.
So what we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their their benefits, that are preventing people from preventing research from happening, that are, extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we're fixing it.
Speaker 1: And does that include AI? Does that include kind of changing the system overall? That's, I guess, what people are afraid of is they don't know
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What this is all looking like, and is it gonna affect me in the long term?
Speaker 2: It's gonna affect them. It's gonna affect people very positively. So the the changes that we're doing here will ensure the solvency of the American government, of the American of of The United States Of America. This is what this is what we're trying to do is ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the if the if the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.
Speaker 1: Anthony Armstrong, Doge, office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley banker, m and a guy. Yeah. You know money, and this is a lot of money sloshing around.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of money sloshing around. It's a lot of money sloshing out the door. And if you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it's really a one way ratchet over decades.
Speaker 1: You It's only going up.
Speaker 5: It's only going up. You never you never take it away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions. It leaves you with overstaffing, and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places. So a couple of examples, duplicative functions.
Brad mentioned 27 CIOs. If you had kept going with Brad, he probably he would talk about the communications office. I think you've got forty forty distinct communications offices in HHS. Yeah. 40?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's not unusual by by the way. Multiple offices like It's like anyone healthy. This is not about the employees there.
There's many many hardworking, well meaning people who who took jobs. These jobs were out there. They applied for them. They took them. They're doing what's there.
It's just that they're duplicating the effort of 40 offices. So you've got that. You've got over staffing. A good example of over staffing would be the IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. So if you join the IRS, you get a laptop and a cell phone, you're provisioned.
So if each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day, you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year
Speaker 2: 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone.
Speaker 5: Right. The the whole IRS could be handled once a month. So that doesn't that doesn't make any sense. And president Trump's been very clear. It's scalpel, not hatchet, and that's the way it's it's getting done.
And then once those decisions are made, there's a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, being compassionate, and treating everyone with dignity and respect. And and if you look at how people have started to leave the government, it is largely through voluntary means. There's voluntary early retirement. There's voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation, the eight month severance program.
So there's a very heavy bias towards programs that are long dated, that are generous, that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector. And you've you've heard a lot of a lot of news about rifts about people getting fired. At at this moment in time, less than point one five not 1.5, less than point one five of the federal workforce has actually been given a riff notice.
Speaker 1: So So they've selected if they're a leader.
Speaker 2: It it is Basically, almost no one's gotten fired That's what we're saying.
Speaker 1: Tom Krausz, working at treasury, you are having access to the payment system, oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially, payments were going places we didn't know where they were going. Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the case, Brett. You know, as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we're doing is we're applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There is actually really only one bank account that's used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government.
Speaker 1: Time out. One bank account.
Speaker 2: It's a big one.
Speaker 1: It's a
Speaker 3: big one. It's a
Speaker 7: big one. One. A couple weeks ago, had $800,000,000,000 in it, but it's the the treasury general account. So when you hear, you know, some of my colleagues here, what they're talking about in terms of the fraud, you have to ask, well, why is this allowed to happen at a financial level? Well, it's actually quite simple but alarming.
The treasury up until now, and thanks to president Trump, we're fixing this. In fact, there's an executive order that he just signed, the other day, which is protecting America's bank account because it really is the taxpayers' money. One, we're changing the culture. The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what's right relative to financial operations. There's a $500,000,000,000 of fraud every year.
There's hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments, and we can't pass an audit. The the consolidated financial report is produced by treasury, and we cannot pass it on. We have material weaknesses. What that means is that if I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed. I couldn't file financial statements.
I couldn't issue securities. Can't on. Can't it on.
Speaker 2: Right. The the federal government cannot pass an order. It's impossible. In fact, the the in order to pass an order, you need the information necessary to pass an order. You need to have the payment codes.
You need to have the payment explanation, and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory Yeah. Until until just recently, just a few weeks ago. In fact, maybe last week?
Speaker 7: Yeah. We're serving 580 plus agencies. And up until very recently, effectively, they could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible. No verification. And so what we're doing is what any household would do.
But imagine you're a household, you have a bank account, everyone has an ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook connected to that account. It's not just your children. It's not just your parents. It's your in laws. It's your extended family.
And they all can go to the account and disperse funds. No questions asked. No justification. No verification.
Speaker 1: Tyler, Hasson, interior department, you're a form former oil company CEO. You're reviewing contracts before they're approved for funding. What what are you finding?
Speaker 8: Well, Elon and Steve kinda stole my thunder a little bit, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here. I could have done this in high school. And I I found it
Speaker 2: It's that bad.
Speaker 8: I found it on the weekends because under the Biden administration, there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever. None. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single grant. And when things come to my attention that don't make sense, I'm bringing him to secretary Bergam, and he has been fantastic. He's he's a businessman.
He's very supportive of Doge. It's been wonderful
Speaker 2: to work with Is
Speaker 1: the battle between government of decades and decades of buildup and business, which you guys are, is that like a train hitting each other? I mean, it it seems like it's pretty disruptive. Well, this is a revolution.
Speaker 2: And I think it it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution. But at the end of the day, America is gonna be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it's gonna be a fantastic future. And but are we gonna get a lot of complaints along the way?
Absolutely. You know, one the things I learned at PayPal was the you know, who complains the loudest and the with the the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. That's it's a tell. You know these NGOs that are crazy?
Like the the $2,000,000,000 to Stacey Abrams NGO that basically didn't exist and suddenly gets $2,000,000,000 awarded from the federal government. She has why. And there are many such cases like that.
Speaker 1: I think that most people, common sense wise, would say the fraud's gotta end.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They're concerned about the 94 year old mother who skips a check or somehow doesn't get what she's supposed to get.
Speaker 2: Right. And what we're trying to say is actually the that that the 94 year old grandmother is is actually, as a result of Joe Doge's work, going to get her check. She's not going to be robbed by fraudsters like she's getting robbed today. And the solvency of the of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks that Medicare continues to work without which we're all doomed. And the reason we're doing this is because if if we don't do it, America's gonna go insolvent.
We're gonna go bankrupt, and nobody's gonna get anything.
Speaker 1: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean, you can pipe up, but it you don't have to be here. Right? I mean, you don't you don't have to be doing this.
Speaker 7: I have four blessed with four beautiful children, my wife and I, But we have a real fiscal crisis, and and this is not sustainable. And what's worse, back to my children and everyone else's children, is we are burdening them with that debt, and it's only gonna grow.
Speaker 1: Steve, there's not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different, you know, silos, but with the same kind of goal. Right? I mean,
Speaker 3: this is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government. Yeah. Exactly. And we're headed in a bad path, but then the chance of success exists. And just the one that just is in my head right now, which is a fairly mundane one, but I think is very illustrative is credit cards.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: There are in the in the federal government around 4,600,000 credit cards for around 2.3 to 2,400,000 employees. This doesn't make sense. Right. And so one of the things all of the teams have have worked on is we've worked with the agencies and said, do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used?
Can you tell us physically where they are? I hope they're getting frequent flyers. Actually, on a different note, the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good. It costs. That's a whole other It's a negotiation.
Right. Yeah. Exactly. But so far, the teams have worked together, and they've reduced it from 4,600,000.0 to to 4,300,000.0. So So we're taking we're taking it easy.
Speaker 7: Yeah. But but
Speaker 2: clearly, there should not be, you know, more there should be more credit cards than there are people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Joe, middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy? I mean
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I mean, I think what you're seeing is taking the best Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We're bringing the best practices and the best methodologies. And people are inspired, right, especially on the retirement process, which I can speak to. They've been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early two thousands, very unsuccessfully.
Every attempt has gone over budget, and been canceled, because it hasn't been successful. And so, you know, I showed up and I feel like I'm here because it's an interesting problem. We can use design to solve it and good engineering and really create a better experience for everybody.
Speaker 2: They were we're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. So, like, if if these can if if if the federal government if if if a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would be go immediately go bankrupt. It would be delisted. The officers would be arrested. And the changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit.
It will enable enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard earned tax tax dollars are being spent well. But the ways that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other. So if the computer systems systems don't talk to each other, then it you you can you can exploit that gap and and forces exploit that exploit that gap, take advantage. If, for example, there were over $300,000,000 of small business administration loans that has been given out to people under the age of 11.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, to add to this, 300,000,000 under the age of 11 and over three hundred million to over the age of 120.
Speaker 1: Definitely Small business loans.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: The the oldest American is a hundred and 14. So it's safe to say if their age is 15 or above, they're they're fake, or they should be in the Guinness Guinness Book of World Records. And we we should not be giving out loans to babies. So the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a nine month year old, which is a very very cautious baby we're talking about here. So obviously, it was just fraudulent.
And what they and and they do terrible things. They actually will see that a a kid's been born. They will steal that kid's social security number and then take out a loan, and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. There was literally a baby. The terrible things are being done is what we're saying.
And how? We're stopping these terrible things.
Speaker 1: And you can stop it?
Speaker 4: I mean Well, we are stopping
Speaker 2: The reason this is happening
Speaker 5: is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: Right? And so you don't know at the small business administration that you're giving a loan to a nine month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross referencing that with the social security administration data that has birth dates. So that very, very simple fix Yes. Eliminates tremendous fraud. And and that there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another.
And if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised? One of ways
Speaker 2: that like, one one of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is mocked as live and as as sort of just that that Social Security number is mocked as live in Social Security, and then then get disability and unemployment insurance for a dead person. Because the databases don't talk to each other, all they got was from Social Security is like, is this person alive? Yes. They're not they're not alive. It's falsely marked person is falsely marked as alive in social security, but they didn't but but that first a fraudster can now get unemployment and disability for from a dead person.
This is happening all the time at scale.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in? There's about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds. They're being challenged by the DOJ. Right. Are you surprised by that pushback?
Speaker 2: Well, it's the the DC circuit is notorious for having a very far left bias. And when you look at the people close to some of these judges, who who who are where are they working? Are they working at these NGOs? Are they getting the the other ones getting this money? Does that seem like system that lacks corruption?
It sounds like corruption to me.
Speaker 1: Last thing. Do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? I mean, is that really what this is about? It's essential. Very
Speaker 8: much. I do. A %. I I was running five businesses in Houston, and and I left that. I left great people to do this.
And my wonderful wife said, go for it. And here I am. But I I feel like this is me giving back to the country.
Speaker 2: If if we don't do this, we're sunk. The ship unless unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink. That's why we're doing it.
Speaker 1: Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate the time today. And hopefully, it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what's happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
@RepMTG - Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸
A must watch!!! @elonmusk and the @DOGE team is saving our country and we owe them a great debt of gratitude!!
@america - America
Bret Baier’s full interview with Elon Musk and @DOGE: https://t.co/7KmRs8UJq2
Video Transcript AI Summary
Doge aims to cut the deficit by $1 trillion by reducing waste and fraud, targeting a 15% reduction in federal spending. Astonishingly, billions are wasted casually, like a billion-dollar charge for a simple online survey. Doge aims to cut waste by $4 billion daily and publishes findings on doge.gov for transparency.
A key project involves digitizing the government retirement process, currently a paper-based system housed in a mine with 400 million documents. The goal is to transform it into an online system, processing retirements in days instead of months.
Doge is also addressing IT issues, including outdated systems and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Social Security is a focus, aiming to prevent fraud and improve service, after discovering 40% of calls to change direct deposit information are fraudulent. The team is working to ensure the solvency of the American government.
The federal government has 4.6 million credit cards for 2.3 million employees, and the team is working to reduce the number of cards. There is only one bank account used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government. The team is working to apply public company standards to the federal government.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Disparate.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having us and doing this. I know there's a lot of interest in this. You know, first, let me start with you, Elon. What are the what are the budgetary savings goals, and and how much do you think you've achieved so far?
Speaker 2: Our our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So, from a nominal deficit of 2,000,000,000,000 to try to cut the deficit in half to 1,000,000,000,000, or looked at it in total federal spending to drop the federal spending from 7,000,000,000,000 to 6,000,000,000,000. We wanna reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by fifth 15%, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not not efficient, and there's a lot of lot of waste and fraud. So, we feel confident that a 15% reduction can can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk to all the guys
Speaker 2: making it better.
Speaker 1: And talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you, what's the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?
Speaker 2: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind blowing. Just we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually. You know, for example, like the simple the simple survey that was literally 10 question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost about $10,000 was the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.
For just the survey? A billion dollars for for a simple online survey. Do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go to nothing.
Speaker 1: It was like a time. You technically are a special government employee, and you're supposed to be a hundred and thirty days. Are you going to continue past that, or do you think that's the what you're gonna do? Or Well, I I
Speaker 2: think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.
Speaker 1: So in that time frame, a hundred and days. And and the process is a report at some point, a hundred
Speaker 2: days or Not really a report. We we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day like that passes, our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4,000,000,000 a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk of the specifics, but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously, lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And he they characterize the approach as this, fire, ready, and then aim. And how do you approach that? How do you respond to that?
Speaker 2: Well, I I do agree that we actually wanna be careful in the cuts. So we want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. And, actually, that is that is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that, which is not to say that we make we don't make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying you someone in baseball's gonna bat a thousand.
That's impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly, and we we move on.
Speaker 1: Some people say this shouldn't take a rocket scientist. Steve Davis, you are a rocket scientist. Used to be. Yeah. Know.
And now, essentially, you're the chief operating officer of Doge, day to day operations. Fair to say?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Part part of the Doge team.
Speaker 1: What so how did you end up here? What's the biggest challenge you see?
Speaker 3: The reason I'm here, which is probably for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the tax payers in the country would agree that in order to have the the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore, the country going not bankrupt is a good thing, that all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do. I think the thing that's special right now is we actually believe there's a chance to succeed, that there's an administration that's supportive, and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. And I think that's given the inspiring mission and given the, nonzero chance of success, it it was worth down.
Speaker 2: I just just like to sort of re upsize that point. The success of those is only possible with president Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.
Speaker 1: But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers. Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bid is often a billion dollars. So for example, the $830,000,000, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money. That wouldn't have been found if the Doge team wasn't working with it, in that case, the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further, Doge then publish publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency.
So now the general public it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log in to doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they're not yet in real time. They're close, but they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.
Speaker 1: But the process still involves congress. Right? At some level?
Speaker 2: We're trying to keep congress as informed as possible, but it it the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly. It should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It's not contrary to congress to avoid waste and fraud. It is consistent with the law and consistent with congress, and we've seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the of the house and occasionally some Democrats too. You know, it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while.
But usually, when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. So they'll they'll say what we're doing is somehow unconstitutional or legal or whatever. We're like, well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can't point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the doge handle on x.
And you'll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.
Speaker 1: Joe Gabbian, besides Elon, you're one of several billionaires here, cofounder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.
Speaker 4: I bumped into Anthony Dewan probably back in February, and they told me something about a a mine that was dealt with retirement. And they said that he needs somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I I love the challenge, I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government. Now picture this.
This this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400,000,000 pieces of paper. It's a process that started in the nineteen fifties and largely hasn't changed in the last seventy years. And so as he dug into it, we found retirement cases that had so much paper, they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months, and we're gonna make it just many days.
Speaker 1: Will it be digitized or how
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: So this will be an
Speaker 4: online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think, you know, it's an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. So we really believe that the government can have an Apple Store like experience, beautifully designed, great, easier experience, modern systems.
Speaker 1: Because right now, it's by hand.
Speaker 2: Yes. The the the retirement process is all by paper, literally with people carrying paper and manila envelopes in into this gigantic mine.
Speaker 1: So they can't retire more than a certain number every month?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: About about 8,000 a month.
Speaker 2: That that that's how we the reason we discovered it was we were saying like, well, let's encourage voluntary retire retirement. That's the most you could be that could they could do is 8,000 a month. And and even don't know what circumstances it can take six to nine months just to just to have your time and paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong. So like, well, why would it take so long to retire? And they're like, well, because of the mind.
You're like, what do mean a mind? What's a mind got to do with retiring? And that's where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done by still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the nineteen fifties. Like, we took a snapshot of the mind when it first started in the fifties to today. It looks the same.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. So how long do you think it'll take take to turn over?
Speaker 4: We're working as fast as we can. Probably next couple of months, we'll have this this overhauled. And, you know, I really think, again, like, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There's a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire. I I think we can do better for them.
Speaker 1: Aram Mogadasi, a Doge engineer. Yeah. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, first people to go into the agencies and view the computer datasets. Tell me what you're finding. And for people who don't understand how that process works, explain it for them.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I'll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically, the state of government computers. By some estimates, government IT costs about a hundred billion dollars, and it's funding systems that are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain, and, they could be the the efforts to improve them are often very delayed.
So I I thought I'm a software engineer, that that maybe could make a difference here, and, that's that's really what inspired me at a high level.
Speaker 1: There's lot of history about Social Security and a lot of words about it from here's what Democrats have been saying about
Speaker 3: It's absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security.
Speaker 0: Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security.
Speaker 1: Their goal is clear, destroy Social Security from within. You're in the building. I mean, you're in the computers. What's happening there? What are you doing?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 0: It doesn't line up with my experience on the ground. And I'll say the two improvements that we're trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better. And I'll give you one one example is at Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.
Speaker 1: Forty percent?
Speaker 0: That's right. Almost half.
Speaker 2: Yes. And and they they steal people's social security is what happens. Is they they call in, they say, they claim to be a retiree, then they they and they convince the post the Social Security person on the phone to change the where the where the money is flowing. It it actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day every day.
And and then and then somebody doesn't receive their Social Security is because of of all the the forward loopholes in the Social Security system.
Speaker 1: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not gonna affect their benefits?
Speaker 2: No. In fact, what what we're doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people, as a result of the work of Doge, will receive more social security, not less. Wanna emphasize that. As a result of the work of Doge, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.
Speaker 1: Alright.
Speaker 2: And and and and let the record show that I said this and the it will be proven out to be true. Let's let's check back on this in the future.
Speaker 1: So it's Washington Post. The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in ten days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. Freaked people out. Is it is that gonna change?
Speaker 2: Yes. We're gonna make sure that the website stays online.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, but is it a result of going in there No. Or something you're doing?
Speaker 3: It's No. No. The the amount of issues that were the social security system are are enormous. As an example, there are over 15,000,000 people that are 20 that are marked as alive in the social security system.
Speaker 1: And that's an accurate figure.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Correct. 15,000,000.
Speaker 3: Correct. This has been something that's been identified as a problem. Again, preexisting problems since February at least from an IG report. So there are some great people working at the social security administration Social Security Administration that found this 02/2008 and nothing was done. And so 15 to 20,000,000 social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.
There'd be no way to use those for good intentions. And so what one of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
Speaker 1: Brett Smith, working at HHS, and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid, NIH. What are you finding?
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, I'd say there's a couple of things we're really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one, making sure we continue to have the best biomedical research in the world. And number two, making sure which president Trump has said over and over again that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid, but there's a lot of opportunity. So if I take NIH as an example, today, if you're an NIH researcher and you get a hundred dollar grant at your university, today, you get to spend 60 of that and your university spends 40 of that.
The policy that we're proposing to make is that you get to spend 85 of that and your university spends 15. So that's more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures. Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers. They got created over time by congress and they're typically by disease state or body system. There's 700 different IT systems today at NIH.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred different IT systems.
Speaker 2: IT software systems. They don't connect.
Speaker 6: They can't speak to each other.
Speaker 1: So they don't talk to one.
Speaker 6: They have 27 different CIOs. And so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.
Speaker 1: Time out. Time out. You said 27 different chief information officers?
Speaker 6: Correct. Correct.
Speaker 2: And most of them are nontechnical.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot there.
Speaker 6: There's a there's a lot of opportunity. It will make science better, not worse.
Speaker 2: And when I say that our job is tech support, I really mean it. Yeah. We have to fix the computers. If the computers can't talk to each other, you can't get research done. If the computers can't go stay online, people won't receive their social security.
So what we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their their benefits, that are preventing people from preventing research from happening, that are, extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we're fixing it.
Speaker 1: And does that include AI? Does that include kind of changing the system overall? That's, I guess, what people are afraid of is they don't know
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What this is all looking like, and is it gonna affect me in the long term?
Speaker 2: It's gonna affect them. It's gonna affect people very positively. So the the changes that we're doing here will ensure the solvency of the American government, of the American of of The United States Of America. This is what this is what we're trying to do is ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the if the if the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.
Speaker 1: Anthony Armstrong, Doge, office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley banker, m and a guy. Yeah. You know money, and this is a lot of money sloshing around.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of money sloshing around. It's a lot of money sloshing out the door. And if you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it's really a one way ratchet over decades.
Speaker 1: You It's only going up.
Speaker 5: It's only going up. You never you never take it away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions. It leaves you with overstaffing, and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places. So a couple of examples, duplicative functions.
Brad mentioned 27 CIOs. If you had kept going with Brad, he probably he would talk about the communications office. I think you've got forty forty distinct communications offices in HHS. Yeah. 40?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's not unusual by by the way. Multiple offices like It's like anyone healthy. This is not about the employees there.
There's many many hardworking, well meaning people who who took jobs. These jobs were out there. They applied for them. They took them. They're doing what's there.
It's just that they're duplicating the effort of 40 offices. So you've got that. You've got over staffing. A good example of over staffing would be the IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. So if you join the IRS, you get a laptop and a cell phone, you're provisioned.
So if each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day, you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year
Speaker 2: 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone.
Speaker 5: Right. The the whole IRS could be handled once a month. So that doesn't that doesn't make any sense. And president Trump's been very clear. It's scalpel, not hatchet, and that's the way it's it's getting done.
And then once those decisions are made, there's a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, being compassionate, and treating everyone with dignity and respect. And and if you look at how people have started to leave the government, it is largely through voluntary means. There's voluntary early retirement. There's voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation, the eight month severance program.
So there's a very heavy bias towards programs that are long dated, that are generous, that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector. And you've you've heard a lot of a lot of news about rifts about people getting fired. At at this moment in time, less than point one five not 1.5, less than point one five of the federal workforce has actually been given a riff notice.
Speaker 1: So So they've selected if they're a leader.
Speaker 2: It it is Basically, almost no one's gotten fired That's what we're saying.
Speaker 1: Tom Krausz, working at treasury, you are having access to the payment system, oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially, payments were going places we didn't know where they were going. Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the case, Brett. You know, as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we're doing is we're applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There is actually really only one bank account that's used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government.
Speaker 1: Time out. One bank account.
Speaker 2: It's a big one.
Speaker 1: It's a
Speaker 3: big one. It's a
Speaker 7: big one. One. A couple weeks ago, had $800,000,000,000 in it, but it's the the treasury general account. So when you hear, you know, some of my colleagues here, what they're talking about in terms of the fraud, you have to ask, well, why is this allowed to happen at a financial level? Well, it's actually quite simple but alarming.
The treasury up until now, and thanks to president Trump, we're fixing this. In fact, there's an executive order that he just signed, the other day, which is protecting America's bank account because it really is the taxpayers' money. One, we're changing the culture. The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what's right relative to financial operations. There's a $500,000,000,000 of fraud every year.
There's hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments, and we can't pass an audit. The the consolidated financial report is produced by treasury, and we cannot pass it on. We have material weaknesses. What that means is that if I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed. I couldn't file financial statements.
I couldn't issue securities. Can't on. Can't it on.
Speaker 2: Right. The the federal government cannot pass an order. It's impossible. In fact, the the in order to pass an order, you need the information necessary to pass an order. You need to have the payment codes.
You need to have the payment explanation, and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory Yeah. Until until just recently, just a few weeks ago. In fact, maybe last week?
Speaker 7: Yeah. We're serving 580 plus agencies. And up until very recently, effectively, they could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible. No verification. And so what we're doing is what any household would do.
But imagine you're a household, you have a bank account, everyone has an ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook connected to that account. It's not just your children. It's not just your parents. It's your in laws. It's your extended family.
And they all can go to the account and disperse funds. No questions asked. No justification. No verification.
Speaker 1: Tyler, Hasson, interior department, you're a form former oil company CEO. You're reviewing contracts before they're approved for funding. What what are you finding?
Speaker 8: Well, Elon and Steve kinda stole my thunder a little bit, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here. I could have done this in high school. And I I found it
Speaker 2: It's that bad.
Speaker 8: I found it on the weekends because under the Biden administration, there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever. None. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single grant. And when things come to my attention that don't make sense, I'm bringing him to secretary Bergam, and he has been fantastic. He's he's a businessman.
He's very supportive of Doge. It's been wonderful
Speaker 2: to work with Is
Speaker 1: the battle between government of decades and decades of buildup and business, which you guys are, is that like a train hitting each other? I mean, it it seems like it's pretty disruptive. Well, this is a revolution.
Speaker 2: And I think it it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution. But at the end of the day, America is gonna be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it's gonna be a fantastic future. And but are we gonna get a lot of complaints along the way?
Absolutely. You know, one the things I learned at PayPal was the you know, who complains the loudest and the with the the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. That's it's a tell. You know these NGOs that are crazy?
Like the the $2,000,000,000 to Stacey Abrams NGO that basically didn't exist and suddenly gets $2,000,000,000 awarded from the federal government. She has why. And there are many such cases like that.
Speaker 1: I think that most people, common sense wise, would say the fraud's gotta end.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They're concerned about the 94 year old mother who skips a check or somehow doesn't get what she's supposed to get.
Speaker 2: Right. And what we're trying to say is actually the that that the 94 year old grandmother is is actually, as a result of Joe Doge's work, going to get her check. She's not going to be robbed by fraudsters like she's getting robbed today. And the solvency of the of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks that Medicare continues to work without which we're all doomed. And the reason we're doing this is because if if we don't do it, America's gonna go insolvent.
We're gonna go bankrupt, and nobody's gonna get anything.
Speaker 1: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean, you can pipe up, but it you don't have to be here. Right? I mean, you don't you don't have to be doing this.
Speaker 7: I have four blessed with four beautiful children, my wife and I, But we have a real fiscal crisis, and and this is not sustainable. And what's worse, back to my children and everyone else's children, is we are burdening them with that debt, and it's only gonna grow.
Speaker 1: Steve, there's not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different, you know, silos, but with the same kind of goal. Right? I mean,
Speaker 3: this is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government. Yeah. Exactly. And we're headed in a bad path, but then the chance of success exists. And just the one that just is in my head right now, which is a fairly mundane one, but I think is very illustrative is credit cards.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: There are in the in the federal government around 4,600,000 credit cards for around 2.3 to 2,400,000 employees. This doesn't make sense. Right. And so one of the things all of the teams have have worked on is we've worked with the agencies and said, do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used?
Can you tell us physically where they are? I hope they're getting frequent flyers. Actually, on a different note, the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good. It costs. That's a whole other It's a negotiation.
Right. Yeah. Exactly. But so far, the teams have worked together, and they've reduced it from 4,600,000.0 to to 4,300,000.0. So So we're taking we're taking it easy.
Speaker 7: Yeah. But but
Speaker 2: clearly, there should not be, you know, more there should be more credit cards than there are people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Joe, middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy? I mean
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I mean, I think what you're seeing is taking the best Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We're bringing the best practices and the best methodologies. And people are inspired, right, especially on the retirement process, which I can speak to. They've been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early two thousands, very unsuccessfully.
Every attempt has gone over budget, and been canceled, because it hasn't been successful. And so, you know, I showed up and I feel like I'm here because it's an interesting problem. We can use design to solve it and good engineering and really create a better experience for everybody.
Speaker 2: They were we're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. So, like, if if these can if if if the federal government if if if a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would be go immediately go bankrupt. It would be delisted. The officers would be arrested. And the changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit.
It will enable enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard earned tax tax dollars are being spent well. But the ways that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other. So if the computer systems systems don't talk to each other, then it you you can you can exploit that gap and and forces exploit that exploit that gap, take advantage. If, for example, there were over $300,000,000 of small business administration loans that has been given out to people under the age of 11.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, to add to this, 300,000,000 under the age of 11 and over three hundred million to over the age of 120.
Speaker 1: Definitely Small business loans.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: The the oldest American is a hundred and 14. So it's safe to say if their age is 15 or above, they're they're fake, or they should be in the Guinness Guinness Book of World Records. And we we should not be giving out loans to babies. So the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a nine month year old, which is a very very cautious baby we're talking about here. So obviously, it was just fraudulent.
And what they and and they do terrible things. They actually will see that a a kid's been born. They will steal that kid's social security number and then take out a loan, and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. There was literally a baby. The terrible things are being done is what we're saying.
And how? We're stopping these terrible things.
Speaker 1: And you can stop it?
Speaker 4: I mean Well, we are stopping
Speaker 2: The reason this is happening
Speaker 5: is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 5: Right? And so you don't know at the small business administration that you're giving a loan to a nine month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross referencing that with the social security administration data that has birth dates. So that very, very simple fix Yes. Eliminates tremendous fraud. And and that there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another.
And if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised? One of ways
Speaker 2: that like, one one of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is mocked as live and as as sort of just that that Social Security number is mocked as live in Social Security, and then then get disability and unemployment insurance for a dead person. Because the databases don't talk to each other, all they got was from Social Security is like, is this person alive? Yes. They're not they're not alive. It's falsely marked person is falsely marked as alive in social security, but they didn't but but that first a fraudster can now get unemployment and disability for from a dead person.
This is happening all the time at scale.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in? There's about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds. They're being challenged by the DOJ. Right. Are you surprised by that pushback?
Speaker 2: Well, it's the the DC circuit is notorious for having a very far left bias. And when you look at the people close to some of these judges, who who who are where are they working? Are they working at these NGOs? Are they getting the the other ones getting this money? Does that seem like system that lacks corruption?
It sounds like corruption to me.
Speaker 1: Last thing. Do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? I mean, is that really what this is about? It's essential. Very
Speaker 8: much. I do. A %. I I was running five businesses in Houston, and and I left that. I left great people to do this.
And my wonderful wife said, go for it. And here I am. But I I feel like this is me giving back to the country.
Speaker 2: If if we don't do this, we're sunk. The ship unless unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink. That's why we're doing it.
Speaker 1: Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate the time today. And hopefully, it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what's happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
@SawyerMerritt - Sawyer Merritt
Trump has just posted about Elon Musk on Truth Social: https://t.co/EZ7hUNSwHr
@elonmusk - Elon Musk
@SawyerMerritt What’s Truth Social?
@elonmusk - Elon Musk
@SawyerMerritt Never heard of it
@RonPaul - Ron Paul
What A Shame For DOGE -- Trump Should've Listened To Elon https://t.co/Z6Gr86QVJg
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0 recalls the initial excitement and caution around Dogecoin, noting some people were euphoric while others were more cautious about its potential to cut spending. He asks David about the early perception and whether there was fear of losing work or reducing government.
Speaker 1 says it was a funny situation because it happened right before the election. He invited Dr. Paul on his show, A Neighbor's Choice, and describes an idea to challenge the “deep state” on Halloween by asking Dr. Paul to help Elon Musk cut $2,000,000,000,000. He explains he asked Dr. Paul if he’d be willing to help, and Dr. Paul responded politely, not seeking a job but willing to help if asked. This led to Elon Musk expressing interest in bringing Ron Paul on board with Doge, generating a big reaction on Twitter, with memes and images, and people saying they would support changes if Ron Paul helped Doge. After the election, however, there was no follow-up, and Speaker 1 suggests Doge did not become the dog that hunts.
Speaker 0 adds a cautious tone, saying he doesn’t like to be overly optimistic or pessimistic, but felt compelled to be cautious about Doge due to momentum from large spending, special interests, and the sacredness of liberty within democracy. He wished well but urged waiting to see what happens, noting the momentum might not last.
Speaker 2 notes the weekend exclusive that Doge does not exist with eight months left on its charter, highlighting acrimony and negative commentary about Ron Paul’s involvement. He emphasizes that Ron Paul did not intend to join any administration and would help any party that wanted to actually cut government. He suggests it’s easy to become black-pilled about the situation. He contends the president has been captured by DC, describing Gaza, a bloodbath in Gaza, Venezuela, and the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war as ongoing issues. He asserts that Doge was massively popular and that Trump rode that wave into the White House with libertarian support, but as Trump veered away from that stance, his numbers dropped despite claims of improvement on Truth Social. He argues Trump’s declining numbers are evident in major polls, and that the deep state influenced the situation, with the deep state running DC.
Overall, the discussion centers on the rise and decline of Doge’s political relevance, Ron Paul’s involvement, Elon Musk’s role, and the broader political environment including Trump’s trajectory, foreign conflicts, and the influence of the “deep state.”
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: You know, there is something in the news that I think you know a little bit about and paid a little bit of attention to, and you had the right understanding when it was started when a few people got euphoric about it. But there were a few that were a little more cautious about, you know, Doge. You know? Now how what was it gonna do? Was it gonna cut spending?
And it it was something that it was easy to be cynical if you came from a libertarian view. But, David, do you remember that that event when it was started? Tell me, were you super excited? I'm gonna be out of work. There won't be anything to talk about.
Government's gonna be cut way back. What are we gonna do? Well,
Speaker 1: I tell you
Speaker 0: that.
Speaker 1: You know, I tell you what, it was a funny story because it was right before the election, and I asked to have you on, doctor Paul, on my, show, A Neighbor's Choice. And I said, okay. What am I gonna talk about? They and you said you're available for your team said he was that you'd be available for Halloween. And I thought, I I got an idea.
I'll give the deep state a real fright on Halloween. I'll see if I can get doctor Paul to say he'd help Elon. Let me see if I can get a a yes out of you. So I had you on, and I said, hey. Elon wants to cut $2,000,000,000,000.
I think we know the one guy who'd hold him accountable to that. That'd be you, doctor Paul. Would you be willing to help? And, of course, you were very polite and, you know, you said, well, you know, I'm not looking for a job, but I'd be glad to help if he asked. And, all of a sudden, we put that out on Twitter and boom, it's blowing up all over, becomes the number one trending topic.
Your name is going all over Twitter. And Elon finds it and says, I'd love to have Ron Paul join Doge too. And all of you all of a sudden, it's a huge sensation. And he's posting funny memes and images, and people are saying, you know, I wasn't gonna vote for Trump, but if Ron gets to help Doge, then I'll crawl through glass to see that happen. So a lot of people were absolutely thrilled and actually made a big impact.
But, unfortunately, when I saw that they didn't follow-up after the election with you, I said, you know, I think Doge is not gonna be the dog that hunts after all. You know?
Speaker 0: You know, I I never like to be overly optimistic. I I never want to leave everything very down, trodden, and then the world's coming to an end. People should have hope. But in this case, when this came out, I I really, really had to be cautious. I mean, I wished him well, and I'm sure a lot of good libertarians did because there were some good things in there.
But I remember expressing this to many people, may have even on the program, that let's wait and see what happens because there's too much momentum. The momentum is there because the the treatment is so horrendous, and that is when you have all this spending and all these special interests and and this this sacredness sacredness of liberty of democracy. Anybody who can put a majority together can get what they want and the wars that were going on. So I was rather pessimistic, but I kept encouraging it. But it seems like it's not gonna last forever.
It didn't didn't seem to you that it was doing so well at the beginning, then it sort of faded away quick quickly, but they were trying to close the door and not have us notice.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, mean, the reason we're talking about it is it came out over the weekend. Exclusive DOAGE doesn't exist with eight months left on its charter. You know, there's a lot of acrimony and recriminations about it and, people with negative comments and saying, oh, you know, why why did Ron Paul sign on to this? But, you know, what people don't understand, like you like, David said from the beginning, you weren't joining any administration. You would help any any any party that wanted to actually cut government.
And so, Mayne, I think it's easy for us to sit back and be black pilled about the whole thing. Gosh. What could have been? And indeed, the president, unfortunately, has been captured by DC. He's been sucked into the vortex of endless foreign adventures.
He calls them peacemaking, but it's peacemaking with warships. So, you know, we've got Gaza. We've got we've got a bloodbath in Gaza. We've got Venezuela. We've got the ongoing Ukraine Russia war, on and on and on.
And, unfortunately, as both of you gentlemen know, two things. One, Doze was massively popular. And, David, you're right. I mean, he rode that wave. President Trump rode that wave into the White House.
That in libertarian support, rode that into the White House, because it was massively popular. And now that he's veered away from that, look at his numbers. His numbers are in the tank. Despite what he says on Truth Social that his numbers are better than ever, someone underneath that post over the weekend posted the every one of the major polls, and he's down double digits. So it's unpopular to do what he's doing.
He should have listened to Elon. Should He have listened to Ron Paul. He should have gone the Doge route. It's not completely his fault. Congress has a huge role because that's where it hit a brick wall.
But the you know, president Trump does carry a lot of weight, and he could have pushed a lot through if he'd focused on it. But sadly enough, the deep state got him. The d state runs DC.