On Thursday evening, Elon Musk and some of his Department of Government Efficiency team sat for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on “Special Report.” The nerd dream team includes a former rocket scientist, a Houstonian who ran five successful businesses, and the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb.
Musk said he thinks the team can cut the federal deficit by $1 trillion within 130 days. He and the other DOGE engineers gave some eye-popping examples of how scam-ridden federal programs have become.
A Nearly $1 Billion Survey For No Reason
Musk told Baier the federal government was paying nearly $1 billion for an online national parks survey that resulted in no changes or other outcomes as a result of giving the survey. He said the survey should have cost $10,000.
‘The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing,” Musk said, noting that his team “routinely” finds billion-dollar wasteful payments.
15 Million Fraudulent Social Security Numbers
DOGE’s Steve Davis told Baier that more than 15 million Social Security numbers are older than 120 yet marked in the system as “alive.” The oldest living American is 114, Musk noted — meaning those 15 million Social Security numbers are used for fraud.
More Federal Credit Cards than Federal Employees
Tom Krause, the former CFO of a large tech company, called the federal government’s financial management practices “alarming.”
“There’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can’t pass an audit,” he said. “If I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed.”
Federal agencies control some 4.6 million credit cards, which is almost two credit cards for every single one of the 2.3 million federal employees, Davis said. “There should not be more credit cards than there are people,” Musk said. So far, DOGE has eliminated some 300,000 of those 4.6 million federal credit cards, Davis said.
“If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does,” Musk noted, “it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted [on the stock exchange], the officers would be arrested.”
9-Month Wait to Retire Via Paperwork Filed Underground
AirBnb billionaire Joe Gebbia described a “giant cave” with 22,000 filing cabinets housing 400 million pieces of paper. This is the federal government’s antiquated retirement system, which can require, as Musk noted, six to nine months of processing time for a federal worker to retire. Gebbia expressed astonishment the 1950s process wasn’t digitized by now.
“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,” Gebbia said.
He noted federal workers need special training just to get through the retirement process. Most private-sector workers can retire whenever they’re ready.
700 Different IT Systems at Just One Federal Agency
The National Institute for Health has more than 700 different IT software systems that don’t talk to each other, overseen by 27 different chief information officers, most of whom aren’t technicians, Musk and DOGE’s Brad Smith said.
Former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong noted that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has some 40 separate communications offices, “and that’s not unusual.”
The IRS has 1,400 people whose entire job is to supply IRS hires with a company laptop and phone, Armstrong said. If these employees merely supply two IRS employees per day, they could resupply the entire IRS with brand new phones and laptops nearly every month, he noted: “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Clearly, at least 1,000 of those employees are duplicative.
$600 Million in Federal Loans to Children and Dead People
The federal government had on its books $300 million in small business loans to people under the age of 11, and more than $300 million to people older than 120, Musk and Davis said. “We should not be giving out loans to babies,” Musk said.
Obviously, he said, such loans are fraudulent — scammers steal a child’s Social Security number to obtain a loan, destroying the child’s credit for his entire life besides stealing from Americans. Scammers also use their fraudulently obtained SSNs to obtain disability and unemployment payments from taxpayers.
Watch the whole interview here:
Jesus Christ is King
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