Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, Space X and X, has a fourth job as the chief of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with finding corruption, fraud, waste and criminal behavior in the federal government’s spending programs and eliminating it.
He and his team members were interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News, and he revealed that he believes the effort will be able to save taxpayers $1 trillion within the first 130 days of its work.
My interview with the @elonmusk and the @DOGE team tonight on #SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/KKpxEPtu1Z
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 27, 2025
At the Federalist, a summary of the interview explained he revealed the “6 unbelievably scammy federal practices” that have been uncovered so far.
The report, from Joy Pullman, executive editor of the publication, explained Musk said if a commercial company operated the way the federal government has been spending money, it would go bankrupt, and “the officers would be arrested.”
Among the revelations was that the federal government was paying nearly $1 billion for an “online national parks survey.”
The problem? It “resulted in no changes or other outcomes as a result of giving the survey.”
Musk said a realistic charge for such a result would be $10,000.
“It is astonishing,” Musk said of the “waste and fraud in the government.”
Also uncovered have been more than 15 million Social Security numbers for people older than 120.
Those all are fraud, according to DOGE’s Steve Davis, since the oldest American is now 114.
Also, found have been two government credit cards, or more, for each of the nation’s 2.3 million federal government workers.
Team member Tom Krause called that nothing less than “alarming.”
“There’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can’t pass an audit,” he said. “If I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed.”
Joe Gebbia, team member, who launched AirBnB, condemned the process required by the government in order for federal employees to retire.
He said the paperwork involved is stored in 22,000 filing cabinets – a total of 400 million pieces of paper – in a “giant cave.”
That process takes up to nine months.
He said such a burden is “an injustice to civil servants.”
Also cited in by the Federalist was confirmation from team member Brad Smith that the National Institute for Health has “more than 700 different IT software systems that don’t talk to each other.”
They’re managed by 27 different “chief information officers,” the report said.
Then the report revealed the IRS “has 1,400 people whose entire job is to supply IRS hires” with a company laptop and phone.
Armstrong explained that means if those workers each supplied two workers per day, the entire IRS would have new phones and laptops just about every month.
And, DOGE has found, the federal government had loaned $300 million, in its business loan programs, to children under the age of 11, and another $300 million to people older than 120.
Fraud?
Obviously, DOGE team members said.