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The billionaire, whose federal cost-cutting team has been operating in secrecy, asserted that he had uncovered waste and fraud across the bureaucracy, without offering evidence.
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Musk and Trump Appear Together in the Oval Office
Elon Musk, who was accompanied by his 4-year-old son, claimed without evidence that the Department of Government Efficiency had found multiple instances of fraud and waste across the federal government.
X, are you O.K.? This is this is X. And he’s a great guy. Cursory examination of Social Security. And we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. They’re missing out. So, that’s the case where I think they’re probably dead. And if you looked at the. If you looked at the founders today and said, ‘What do you think of the way things have turned out?’ Well, we have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. And this is not something that people want. And it’s not — it does not match the will of the people. We actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website.
- Published Feb. 11, 2025Updated Feb. 12, 2025, 12:55 a.m. ET
The billionaire Elon Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.”
Answering questions from the media for the first time since his arrival in Washington to run the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk and asserted that his work was in the interest of the public and democracy. President Trump sat behind the desk, chiming in with approval as he let the world’s richest man expound for roughly 30 minutes on the rationale for the drastic overhaul of the federal bureaucracy.
The goal is to “restore democracy,” Mr. Musk said. “If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
Among Mr. Musk’s claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking “kickbacks.” He said that “quite a few people” in the bureaucracy somehow had “managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” without explaining how he had made that assessment. He later claimed that some recipients of Social Security checks were as old as 150.
“We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible,” Mr. Musk said, referring to postings by his team on his social media site, X. “So all of our actions are maximally transparent.”
He continued, “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
