Elon Musk and DOGE team give behind the scenes look at their mission

thanks for having us and doing this uh I know there's a lot of interest in this you know first let me start with you Elon what are what are the budgetary savings goals and and how much do you think you've achieved so far our our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars um so it from a nominal deficit of 2 trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to 1 trillion um or looked at it in total federal spending to drop the federal spending from 7 trillion to Six Trillion we want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and for reduce the spending by 15% which seems really quite achievable uh the government is not not efficient um and there's a lot of a lot of waste and fraud so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can uh can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services I'm going to talk to all the guys making it better going talk to all the guys here about the specifics but for you what's the most astonishing thing you found out in this process uh the sheer amount of waste Andro in the government it is astonishing it's mind-blowing uh just uh we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually um you know for example like the the simp the simple survey uh that was uh literally 10 question survey that you could do with Survey Monkey C about $10,000 uh was the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that for just the service a billion dollars for for a simple online survey do you like the national park and then there appear to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey so the survey would just go nothing is that contain you technically are a special government employee and you're supposed to be 130 days are you going to continue past that or do you think that's the what you're going to do or well I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame so in that time frame days and and the process is a report at some point at 100 days or uh not really a report we we are cutting the waste in Fr in real time so every day that that passes uh our goal is to reduce the the waste and frud by $4 billion a day every day s days a week and so far we are succeeding and I'm going to talk of the specifics but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff U obviously lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you uh and he they characterize the approach is this fire ready and then aim and how do you approach that how do you respond to that well I I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts so we want to measure twice if not Thrice and cut once um and uh actually that is that is our approach uh they may characterize it as uh shooting from the hip but it is anything but that uh which does not 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 um someone in baseball's got a bad a thousand that's impossible um so when we do make mistakes we correct them quickly um and we we move on some people say this shouldn't take a rocket scientist uh Steve Davis you are a rocket scientist used to be yeah and now essentially you're the Chief Operating Officer of Doge um day-to-day operations fair to say um yeah part part of the do team what so how did you end up here what's the biggest challenge you see um the reason I'm here which is probably for many is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring I think most of the taxpayers 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 um 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 um that there's an Administration that's supportive um 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 uh non-zero chance of success it it was worth doing I just like to sort of reemphasize that point the the success of Doge 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 but you're finding the the money I mean it's big numbers right yeah like Yan said um the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars so for example the $830 million um 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 into doe. 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 but the process still involves Congress right at some level we try to keep Congress as informed as possible but uh it the law does say that money needs to be spent uh 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 side of of the house and occasionally some Democrats too you know it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while um but uh usually when they attack those they never attack any of the specifics so 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 d. gov and and the Doge had hand on X and you'll see just outrageous things one outrageous thing after another Joe gabia um besides uh Elon you're one of several billionaires here co-founder of Airbnb um and you wanted to help out I bumped into Anthony Elon probably back in February and they told me something about a a mine that was dealt with retirement and they said they needed somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government um I uh I loveed the challenge so I jumped on board and it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania uh 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 million pieces of paper uh it's a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn't changed in the last 70 years and so as he dug into it we found uh retirement cases that had so much paper they had to fit it on a shipping p so uh the process takes many months and we're going to make it just many days will it be digitized or how absolutely so this will be an 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 user experience modern systems because right now it's by hand yes the the retirement process is all by paper literally with people carrying paper and manilla envelopes in into this gigantic mine so they can't retire more than a certain number every month about 8,000 a month that that's how we the reason we discovered it was we were saying like well let's encourage voluntary re retirement they said well the most you could they could do is 8,000 a month um and and even uh I don't normal circumstances it can take 6 to 9 months just to just to have your retirement paperwork processed and they often get the calculations wrong so we're like well why would it take so long to retire and they're like well because of the mine they're like what do you mean a mine what's a mine got to do with retiring and that's where we discovered the that that uh all the retirement stuff is done by still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the 1950s like you took a snapshot of the mine when it first start in the 50s to today it looks the same it's amazing so how long do you think it'll take to turn over uh we're working as fast as we can uh probably next couple 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 think we can do better for them arum mandasi Doge engineer uh you go into these places one of the more than a dozen Engineers first people to go into the agencies and view view the computer data sets tell me what you're finding and for people who don't understand how that process works explain it for them yeah um I'll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning um basically the state of government computers um by some estimates government it cost about hundred billion do and uh 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 um they can be the the efforts to improve them are often very delayed so I thought I'm a software engineer um that that maybe could make a difference here and um that's that's really what inspired me at a high level there's a lot of mystery about social security and a lot of words about it from here's what Democrats have been saying about it it's absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security 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 yeah 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 um helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud um 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 um 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 um we learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters 40% that's right almost half yes and and they steal people so Social Security is what happens is they they call in they say they claim to be uh a retiree um then they and they convince the post the Social Security post on the phone to change the where the where the money is Flowing it it actually goes to some fraudster this this happening all day every day and and then and then somebody doesn't receive their social security it's because of of all the the fraud loopholes in the Social Security System how do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not going to affect their benefit benefits 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 I want to emphasize that as a result of the work of Doge legitimate uh recipients of Social Security will receive more money not less money all right I emphasize that point 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 so Washington post the Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 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 going to change yes we're going to make sure that the website stays online yeah I mean but is it a result of going in there something you're doing it's no no the um the amount of issues that were with the social security system are enormous as an example there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the social security system and that's an accurate figure correct 15 minutes correct this has been something that's been identified as a problem again pre-existing problems since 2008 at least from an IG report so there were some great people working at the Social Security Administration Social Security Administration that found this 2008 and nothing was done and so 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent um were floating around um 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 and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated Brad Smith uh working at HHS um and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid ni IH uh what are you finding yeah well I'd say there's a couple things we're really committed to in our work at HHS number one making sure we continue to have the best biomed 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 $100 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 700 different it system It software systems they can't speak to each other they don't talk to they have 27 different cios and so when you think about making great medical discoveries you have to connect the data time out time out you see 27 different Chief Information officers correct correct and most of people are non-technical so there's a lot there there there's a lot of opportunity it will make science better not worse and when I say that uh 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 uh 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 benefits that are preventing people from preventing resour from happening um that are uh extremely vulnerable to fraud um and we're fixing it 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 what this is all looking like and is it going to affect me in the long term it's going to affect them it's going to affect people very positively so the changes that we're doing here uh will ensure the solvency of the American government of the American of the United States of America this is what this is what we're trying to do is ensure that uh people do receive their benefits in the future um and you can only receive your benefits if the the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way up next how the Doge team plans to streamline some federal jobs and agencies and later Elon Musk answers some of your questions that you asked via [Music] X Anthony Armstrong um Doge office of personnel management uh Morgan Stanley Banker m&a guy uh you know money and this is a lot of money sloshing around there's a lot of money sloshing around uh there'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 it's only going up 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 uh duplicative function 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 40 40 distinct Communications offices in in HHS right yeah 40 um yeah yeah and that's not unusual by by the way and multiple offices like that not making anyone healthy this is not about the employees there there's many many hardworking well-meaning people who who took these jobs these 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 overstaffing a good example of overstaffing 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 you do make any sense why would you have 1400 people who whose only job it is to give out a laptop a phone right 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 scalp will not hatch it 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 dign 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 8-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 you've heard a lot of me a lot of news about riffs about people getting fired at at this moment in time uh less than 0.

15 not 1. 5 less than 0. 15 of the federal Workforce has actually been given a riff notice so so they've selected if they're Le it is basically almost no one's gotten fired that's what we're saying Tom CR uh working at treasury you are having access to the payment system oversees all the outgoing payments essentially those payments were going places we didn't know where they were going right yeah unfortunately that's the case BR um you know as an ex CFO of a big public tech company um 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 time out One bank account it's a big one it's a big one it's a big one it's a big one um couple weeks ago it had $800 billion than 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 uh we're fixing this in fact there's an executive order that he just signed uh the other day which is protecting America's bank account because it really is the taxpayer of money you know one we're changing the culture the culture is is 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 billion do 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 ities of course we depend on can't pass an right the federal government cannot pass an AIT it's impossible in fact um um the the in order to pass an audit you need the information necessary to pass an audit um 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 yeah we're serving 580 plus agencies and up until very recently ly 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 the ATM card connected to that account everyone has a checkbook 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 up next the Doge team targets government contracts and we'll show you what they're finding Tyler uh Hassen uh Interior Department uh you're a for former Oil Company CEO um you're reviewing contracts before they're approved for funding what what are you finding well um Elon and Steve kind of 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 that right I I found it that bad 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 beram and he has been fantastic he's he's a businessman he's very supportive of Doge it's been wonderful to work with him is the back battle between government of Decades of Decades of buildup and business which you guys are is that like a train hitting each other I mean it it seems like um it's pretty disruptive well this is a revolution um and I think it it might be the might be the biggest revolution in government since the original Revolution um but at the end of the day America is going to be in much better shape uh America will be solvent uh the critical programs that people depend upon will work and and it's going to be a fantastic future and but are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way absolutely you know one of 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 ngos that are crazy like the the $2 billion the Stacy AB NGO that basically didn't exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government she say why and there are many cases like that I think that most people Common Sense wise would say the Fraud's got to end they're concerned about the 9 four-year-old mother who Skips a check or somehow doesn't get what she's supposed to get right and what we're trying to say is actually that that the 94-year-old uh grandmother is is actually as a result of Jo doa's work going to get her check she's not going to be robbed by fraud like she's getting robbed today um and the solvency uh of the of the federal govern government will ensure that she continues to receive those Social Security checks that Medicare continues to work um without which we're all doomed and the reason we're doing this is because if if we don't do it America's going to go insolvent we're going to go bankrupt and nobody's going to get anything 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 I have four bless with four children my wife and I um 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 going to grow Ste there's not a lot of hierarchy here you guys are kind of all approaching it in different you know silos but uh with the same kind of goal right I mean this is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government yeah exactly we're headed in a bad path but that 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 um oh yeah there are in in the federal government um around 4.

6 million credit cards for around 2. 3 to 2. 4 million employees um this doesn't make sense right um and so one of the things all 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 fly um actually on a different note the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good compared that's a whole other it's a negotiation sry yeah exactly um but so far the teams have worked together and they've reduced it from 4.

6 million to um to 4.