Elon Musk said on Feb. 12 that he is providing tech support to the White House, while criticizing outdated U.S. government systems and software that he said lack efficiency.
The tech billionaire—who heads the advisory committee known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Trump administration—was dressed for the occasion in a T-shirt reading “Tech Support.”
When asked how he plans to make the government more efficient, Musk said part of his role will be to focus on improving outdated technology used by the executive branch.
“A shocking percentage of the problem—or maybe not shocking to those who know it—a big percentage of the problem is improving the technology that the government runs on,” Musk said.
“The U.S. government runs on a collection of thousands of computers, many of them antiquated, running on very old software, and the computers don’t talk to each other. That’s why tech support is kind of a real thing, in order to make the government more efficient you have to improve the technology.”
He told the summit that the current retirement rate among federal employees is limited to 10,000 a month, largely due to the sheer amount of paperwork associated with leaving and how it is stored and handled.
“Right now, it’s manually calculated paperwork that’s put in an envelope and then taken down a mine shaft and stored in a mine,” Musk said. “One of the things that affects the rate at which federal workers can retire is the speed of the elevator in a mine in Pennsylvania, which is bizarre because it should be digital.”
Musk, the world’s richest man, said he had been informed that the U.S. government has been working toward digitization since 2014 but that it has yet to make sufficient progress.
“So I’m like, ‘We’re going to really need to provide some tech support here otherwise, literally, people can’t even retire, even if they want to,’” Musk said.
Musk Addresses Possible DOGE Conflict of Interest
Musk also spoke to reporters alongside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Feb. 11.“Transparency is what builds trust,” Musk told reporters at the White House.
He said the general public can see everything he is doing with DOGE via continuous updates on X and the DOGE website and that they can assess, themselves, whether or not that work benefits him or his companies.
Trump followed up on Musk’s remarks by stating that the government would not allow Musk to “do that segment or look in that area if there was a lack of transparency or conflict of interest.”
That legal challenge, filed by a coalition of 14 state attorneys general, alleges DOGE lacks authority to access the systems and that the move violates the law and poses a massive cybersecurity and privacy risk.
A Manhattan judge has temporarily blocked DOGE employees from looking at that data and ordered them to destroy any data they may have obtained so far.
Other lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks challenging Trump’s executive actions, including his efforts to freeze payments for federal programs and end automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants on U.S. soil.
