Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already found payment inefficiencies and waste in its probes into the Treasury Department and Social Security Administration, the tech CEO said from the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump on Feb. 11.
“It’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It’s essential,” Musk said. “It’s essential for America to remain solid as a country.”
Musk made the comments during a signing ceremony for Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order directing all federal agencies to coordinate with DOGE in scaling down the size of the U.S. government.
Musk said that DOGE has already made significant findings at the Treasury Department and within the Social Security Administration, and offered ways to make federal workers more productive while responding to his critics in Washington.
1. Treasury Department Payments
“The stuff we’re doing with the Treasury Department is so basic that you can’t believe it doesn’t exist already,” Musk said, describing DOGE’s efforts at the federal agency.He described how many companies have systems that tag individual payments with categorization codes and allow workers to access a comment field to describe each payment.
“And if a payment is on the ‘Do Not Pay’ list, then you don’t actually pay it. None of those things are true currently” with the Treasury Department, Musk said, adding that many fraudulent recipients can take up to a year to get onto an agency’s “Do Not Pay list” while they keep receiving payments in the process.
He suggested that is one of several reasons federal agencies like the Department of Defense routinely fail audits.
“We’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that haven’t been present,” Musk said. “Let’s look at each expenditure and say, ‘Is this actually in the best interest of people?’ And if it is, it’s proved. If it’s not, we should think about it.”
The original restraining order blocked Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” and others in DOGE who are not civil servants from accessing the payment records.
2. DOGE Executive Order
Musk’s comments on Tuesday were made during a signing ceremony for a new executive order from Trump directing all agency heads to work with DOGE to cut staff and limit hiring in the federal government.In reference to the order, Musk said he wants “common sense controls” applied to the government. He said there remain good people in the federal bureaucracy—which he called an “unelected” fourth branch of government—but that bureaucrats still need to be held accountable.
According to a fact sheet on the order provided by the White House, agency heads will consult with DOGE to shrink the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions only.
The Office of Personnel Management will create rules to ensure federal workers are “held to the highest standards of conduct.” After the expiration of the Trump administration’s Jan. 20 hiring freeze, all federal agencies will be allowed to hire no more than one employee for every four who leave or are released from their positions.
3. Social Security Recipients Who Were ‘150 Years Old’
Musk said DOGE found Social Security recipients who were allegedly “150 years old” and payments with no identifying information attached.He also said DOGE wants to “make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it, and to receive it quickly and accurately.”
In addition to discussing ways to reform the Social Security payment system, Musk offered ideas for making federal workers more productive.
To add to “the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way,” Musk suggested that some roles in the federal bureaucracy where workers are still dealing with paper records in outdated processing methods could be shifted to more efficient positions.
4. Response to Criticism, Conflicts of Interest Concerns
Musk was asked about DOGE critics who call his efforts a “hostile takeover of government” done “in a non-transparent way.” He said that Trump and DOGE could not have asked for a stronger mandate from the public in not just the president’s 2024 electoral victory, but also in American voters’ flipping of the Senate and holding the House for the GOP.“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get,” Musk said.
“There are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, 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.”
Many Democratic lawmakers have criticized Musk’s unprecedented role in the federal government, particularly as an unelected, presidentially-appointed “special government employee.” Those lawmakers said that any DOGE efforts that affect federal funding or appropriations are a breach of congressional authority and Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power of the nation’s purse.
“Congress has the ‘power of the purse,’ so its appropriations necessarily set a ceiling on federal spending for a particular purpose, but it should not set the floor,” he said in 2023, referring to his promise to eliminate waste in the budget.
The Democratic lawmakers are also concerned about the executive branch potentially moving to fold federal agencies without congressional approval.
Many of Musk’s critics also contend that he possesses a conflict of interest leading DOGE because his company, SpaceX, is a major aerospace contractor for the U.S. government. Musk rebutted those concerns on Tuesday.
“Transparency is what builds trust,” Musk said, adding that the public can see if any of DOGE’s work benefits him or his companies.
“And we'll give him the approval where appropriate; where not appropriate, we won’t,” the president said. “If there’s a conflict, then we won’t let him get near it,” he said.
