And we're going to be signing a very important deal today. It's Doge. And I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found, which is shocking. Billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. And I think it's very important. And that's one of the reasons I got elected. I say we're going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick, and that corrupt.
And it seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars worth much more than that in just a short period of time. And we want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say we don't want you to do that well. So maybe we have to look at the judges, because that's very serious. I think it's a very serious
violation. I'll ask Ilan Musk to say a few words and we'll take some questions. Elon, go ahead. Sure. So the at A at a high level, if you say what is the goal of Doge or or and and I think a a significant part of the of the presidency is to restore democracy. This may seem seem like well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback loop FX, you would have to if you if you sorry, tell you gravitas can be difficult
sometimes. So if, if, if there's not a good feedback loop from the people 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, and if if you looked at this, if you asked, look at the founders today and said, what do you think of the way things have turned out or what we have this unelected 4th 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 people. So it's just something we've got to, we've got to fix. And they've also got to address the the deficit. So we've got a $2 trillion 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 the national debt exceed the Defense Department budget, which is shocking because we, we've got a lot, we spend a lot of money on defense, but, and, and if that just keeps going, we're essentially going to bankrupt the country. So what I, what I really want to 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. 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 million,
etcetera? Well, we, we, we are, we do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are, there are quite a few people in, in, in the bureaucracy who, who have a ostensibly a salary of a few $100,000, but somehow managed to accrue 10s 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 that which case we should take their investment
advice perhaps. But just this seems to be mysteriously they, they get wealthy and we don't know why. Where does it come from? And I think the reality is that they're getting wealthy at to tax fair expense. That's, that's the, that's the honest truth of it.
So, you know, we, we're looking at say just if you, 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 a comment fields that are also blank, so you don't know why the payment was made. And then we've got this a truly absurd, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year before an organization to get on a do not
pay list. And, 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 can take up to a year to get on the list. And even once on the list, the list is not used. It's mind blowing. So, So what, what we're talking here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that that haven't been present. So they say like, well, how
could such a thing arise? That's that seems that seems crazy that 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 the, and the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest. So then when you understand that, then it 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 going to complain if, if money is spent badly, if the, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and approval manner, then that's not OK. Your, your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on things that matter to the people. I mean, these things like
there's, it's just common sense. It's not, it's, it's, it's not draconian or, or radical. I think it's, it's really just saying let's look at each each of these expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people? And if it is, it's proved. If it's not, we should think about it. So, you know, there's crazy things like just cursory examination of Social Security and we've got people in there that 150 years old now. Do you know anyone is 150? I don't.
OK, this they, 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 want to make, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it and that they receive it quickly and accurately. Also another crazy thing. So, you know, one of the things is like we're, we are trying to sort of right size the the federal bureaucracy. Just make sure that this obviously needs to, there needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently.
So we're saying, well, OK, well, let's, if, if people can retire, you know, with full benefits and 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're told, no, the, the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. And we're like, well, 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 a picture at a picture of this mine. We'll post some pictures afterwards. And this, this mine looks like something out of the 50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a
time warp. And then the the speed, then the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine, the shaft elevator can move, determines how many people can retire from the federal, federal government. And the elevator breaks down and sometimes and then you can't, nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy? There's like 1000 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 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. So normally it's quiet.
You're detractors, Mr. Mosley. I have to what? Including a lot of Democrats. I have detractors. You do, Sir. I don't believe it. 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? Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from from the public. The public voted. You know, we have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump won the House, it 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 going to get. They're going to 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 going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about.
Mr. Musk, 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, we we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions repost our actions to the, the Dodge handle on X and to the, the Dodge website.
So all of our actions are, are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been, I, I don't know of a case that where an organization's been more transparent than the Dojo 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 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. They actually are not paid, which currently they are paid.
These, these are, these are not individual judgement 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 like to do with like say a contract with some company of mine at all. But if there is a conflict 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 fully public. So if you see anything you say like, wait a second, hey, you know that doesn't that seems like maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. It's not like people are going to be shy about saying that.
They'll say it immediately, you know, including. You. Yourself, yes, but it's transparency is what builds trust. Not simply somebody asserting trust, not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency. So you can see everything that's going on and you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not?
It's totally obvious 2/1. On the latest edition of the Bloomberg. Business Week podcast conversation with Max. Chad, in a business week, there was a. Elon Musk's offered by Open AI. And Studio Sam. Often reaction to. That bit, we watched that also. 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 is, 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 10s 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? Why would they want to do that? I can't paint on this. I can't paint 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 them for the next 20 years. You know, because nobody ends a contract. You get a lot of that.
You have a contract that's three A3 month contract. Now normally if you're in a small in, in all fairness, it's the size of this thing is so big. 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 20 years. And the guy doesn't say that he got money for 20 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 it could be corruption. It could be a deals made on both sides. You know where I get some money, he kicks. I think he has a lot of kickback here. I see a lot of kickback here. There's a lot of kickbacks, 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, a lot of things. But this is a big part of it. And I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to to, among other things, fines, 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 going to be probably close to a trillion dollars. It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're going to 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 million, fifty 9 million because of, because it's housing migrants, illegal migrants, all illegal, I believe. And and they were being paid twice the normal room rate at 100% occupancy. Unbelievable so.
It's a racket, Justin. Must have asked A. Question you should, if, if I may, sort of just going for the President's comments at A, at a high level, say, well, well, what, how exactly how do what, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from 2 trillion to one trillion? 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 might as well just 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 trillion 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 boulders of America to build. And if we do that, that means I think you get the economic growth to be maybe 3-4 percent, maybe 5%. And that means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you can cut the budget deficit by a trillion between now and next year, there is no inflation. There's no inflation at 26.
And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone's the mortgage, the car payment, their credit card bills, any, their, their, their student debt, the, the monthly payments drop. That's a fantastic scenario for the average American. I mean, imagine they, they're going down the gross way aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same and their and their, their, you know, their mortgage, all the debt
payments dropped. How great is that for the average American? We had no idea. We had no idea we're going to find this much and it's open. It's it's not like complicated. It's. Simple stuff. It's like a lot of work. We 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 anywhere, maybe $500 billion. 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 100. Here, you're almost reversing it. You look for one that's good. Yeah. 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 for years this has gone on. Yeah. Go ahead.
Wait. Go. Ahead, 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 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 with me. I think we'll get the vote, although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote.
And how could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence? Why would that happen? Why would even Congress want to do that? Now? Congress, if, if we do need a vote, I think we'd 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. If a judge does block one of your policies part of your agenda, will you abide by that
ruling? Will you? Comply. I always 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, yeah, Yeah, the answer is I always abide by the courts, always abide by him, 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. Yeah, if I can add to that, what we're finding is that a bunch of the fraud is not even going to Americans.
So I think we all agree that if there's going to be a 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. And, and this is big, big numbers for about 100 to $200
million a year. Sure, serious money. Miss Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million 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.
And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you think? Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat 1000. I mean, any, you know, we're, we will make mistakes. It will act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, if, if the I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million 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 when you think about it. But you know, if it, if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, OK, that's not as bad. But still, you know why are we doing that 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? Yeah, we work closely with the agency heads and yeah, so, so there's there are sort of checks in place. So it's not just us just going in and doing things Willy nilly. It's it's in partnership with the agency heads. And and I checked recently with the president to make sure that, you know, these this this is what the president wants to have
happen. So, yeah, we, we talk almost every day and, and I, I, you know, I, I double check things to make sure. Is this something, Mr. President, you want us to do this, We'll, we'll then we'll do it. USAIUSAID 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? Yeah. So 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 prevention. 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. So that's a.
Worthy cause USAID. I I think that there's some worthy things, but but overall, if you say what is the Bank of the buck, I would say it was not very good and there was far too much of what USAIID was doing was influencing, influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day. You just have to follow up to
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, which we. Definitely need to do and are going to do at the president's request. Does. That present a conflict of interest for you. No, because you'd have to look at the individual contract and say, first of all, 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 for money for the taxpayer, let me know because every one of them was. 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 U.S. Treasuries? I think you mean the the Treasury Department as opposed to Treasury bills or you also? Referenced Treasuries on Air Force One the other night. Well, the as I mentioned earlier, really the the 1st order of business is to make sure we're actually collecting. Sorry for this.
I thought my son might, might enjoy this, but it's, he's sticking his fingers in my ears and stuff so it's been hard to hear sometimes. Hey, what's up? So no, the stuff we're doing with with 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 a payment categorization code. It's like what type of payment is this? You can't just leave the field
blank. Currently, many payments, the field is left blank 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, a decade ago maybe, or ever really. And we want to 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 task to pause payments if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. Like if, if, if a, if a company or 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, then do not pay list. It means that this is someone that is just is 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. 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 going to look at the military. We'll 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? Yes. And it's going to go to numbers that you're not going to believe. And much, as I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. And the only way we're going to catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is going to say you're not allowed to look for it, that's pretty sad for our country. I don't understand how it could even work. I'm.
Sorry. A program? Can you personally guarantee that? Which one? The buyout program? The offer to federal workers Can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid? Through September 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's showing up to work because they were told not to.
And then Biden gave them a five year pass. Some of them, 48,000 of them gave them a five year pass that for five years, you don't have to show up to work. And, and let 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. Back tonight will be at the White House tonight at about 10:00. If you want to come over, you can say hello to anything. In return.