Transcription
Welcome to Special Report. We are in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, right next to the White House. In just a moment, we'll talk to Elon Musk and members of the Doge team. What they're working on specifically? We'll cover all kinds of topics throughout the hour.
There was other news today. First, the other headlines: President Trump is pulling a Lee Zeldin nomination to be the US ambassador to the United Nations. The president says he asked the New York Republican representative to stay in Congress. Stefanik's confirmation had been stalled over concerns about Republicans' tight margins in the House.
Authorities have captured the MS-13 gang's top leader for the US East Coast. Officials apprehended the Salvadoran national this morning in Woodbridge, Virginia, just south of Washington, DC. The FBI says the 24-year-old is one of the top three leaders of the MS-13 gang in the US.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the nation's health agencies will cut 10,000 jobs from their 82,000-person workforce. The Health and Human Services Secretary saying the department will also close half of its regional offices. The cuts, along with previous restructuring and voluntary buyouts, mean HHS will be dropping around 20,000 workers.
Stocks were off today in a choppy trading session as the markets weigh auto tariffs. The Dow lost 155; the S&P 500 fell 19; the Nasdaq dropped 95.
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 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 uh the federal spending from 7 trillion to 6 trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable. Uh, the government is 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 without making it better. Going to talk to all the guys here about the specifics, but for you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?
Uh, the sheer amount of waste and fraud 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 uh literally 10-question survey that you could do with Survey Monkey cost about $10,000 uh 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 into nothing. It was like insane.
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, 130 days, and and the process is a report at some point, 100 days or uh not really a report. We we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes, uh our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding. And we're 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 as 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 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 um someone in baseball's got a bat 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. 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 Doge 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 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.
But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers, right?
Yeah, like Elon said, um, the minimum impulse bid 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 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.
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 Republican side of of the House and occasionally some Democrats too. Uh, you know, it's nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while, um, but uh what usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. So they 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.
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 Dwan probably back in February, and they told me something about a a mine was dealt with retirement, and they said they needed somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. Um, I uh I loved 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 you dug into it, we found uh retirement cases that had so much paper they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. 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 in manila 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 retirement. They said, well, the most you could they could do is 8,000 a month, um, and and even uh under normal circumstances, it can take six to nine months just to just to have your retirement paperwork processed, uh, 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 if you took a snapshot of the mine when it first started in the 50s to today, it looks the same. It's amazing.
So how long do you think it'll take take to turn over?
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.
Aram Moanasi, 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 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 costs about a hundred billion dollars, 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 can 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 uh 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 uh also make the experience better, um, 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 and they they steal people's Social Security is what happens is they they call in, they say they claim to be a retiree, um, then they they and they convince the person, 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 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 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 want to 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, the um the amount of issues that were 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 million?
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 this 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 Doge team is doing is carefully and and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.
Brett Smith, uh working at HHS, um, and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid, NIH, 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 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 systems, software systems; they can't speak to each other. So they don't talk to one. 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 said 27 different chief information officers?
Correct.
Correct. And and most of them are non-technical. So there's a lot there there's a 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. 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 pre preventing research from happening, 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 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 comp if 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 Anthony Armstrong, um, Doge Office of Personnel Management, uh the Morgan Stanley Banker, M&A guy.
Yeah, uh you know, money, and this is a lot of money sloshing around. There's a lot of money slloshing around. Uh, there's a lot of money slloshing 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. So 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: duplicative functions. Brad mentioned 27 CIOs. If you kept going with Brad, he probably he would talk about the communications office, and you've got 40 40 distinct communications offices in in HHS.
Right?
Yeah, 40. And that's not unusual by by the way. Multiple offices like that don't make 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 doesn't make any sense. Why would you have 1,400 people who whose only job it is to give out a laptop and 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: 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 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 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 a leader, it it is basically almost no one's gotten fired is what we're saying.
Tom Crest, 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, Brett. 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.
Talking about one bank account?
It's a big one.
It's a big one.
It's a big one.
It's a big one. Um, a couple weeks ago, it had $800 billion in it, but it's the treasure 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 taxpayers' money. You know, 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 billion of fraud every year; there's hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can't pass an audit. The the consolidated financial report is produced by Treasury, and we cannot pass an 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. Of course, can't pass an order, right? The the federal government cannot pass an audit; 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 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, 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.
Up next, the Doge team targets government contracts, and we'll show you what they're finding. [Music]
Tyler Hass, uh Interior Department, uh you're a 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 I I found it 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 them to Secretary Bergam, 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 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 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 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. The NGOs that are crazy, like the the $2 billion to Stacy Abrams NGO that basically didn't exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government. She says why? And there are many such cases like that. I think that most people, common sense wise, would say the fraud's got to end. They're concerned about the 94-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 Doge's work going to get her check; she's not going to be robbed by frauds like she's getting robbed today, um, and the solvency uh of the of the federal 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 blessed with four beautiful 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, everyone else's children, is we are burdening them with that debt, and it's only going to grow.
Steve, 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. And 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.
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. This doesn't make sense, right? Um, 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.
Um, actually, on a different note, the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good compared. That's a whole other.
Exactly.
Um, but so far the teams have worked together, and they've reduced it from 4.6 million to um to 4.3 million. So we're we're taking it easy, but clearly there should not be, you know, more there should not be more credit cards than there are people.
Yeah. Joe, middle-level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy?
I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think what you're seeing is taking the best of Silicon Valley and the business world and bringing it into the government. We're bringing the best practices and the best methodologies, um, and uh people are inspired, right? Especially uh on the retirement process, which I can speak to, um, they've been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early 2000s, um, very unsuccessfully. Every attempt has gone over budget, um, and been cancelled, uh uh 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. We're talking about elementary financial controls that
Are necessary for any company to function, so like if if these if if the federal government, uh, if if a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would be, uh, go immediately go bankrupt. It would be delisted; the officers would be arrested.
The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit. It will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard-earned tax tax dollars are being spent well.
Up next, the Doge team on flaws they're finding in digital government systems. Heat heat [Music] heat heat [Music] [Music]