By The American Tribune | Created at 2025-03-18 10:29:56 | Updated at 2025-03-20 19:48:05
2 days ago
Speaking in an exclusive interview with FOX Business host Larry Kudlow on his eponymous show, Kudlow,” Tesla owner, SpaceX founder, and current Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk commented on how DOGE works and what sort of massive corruption and fraud he has found as his team pours over federal spending.
For reference, DOGE was created by President Trump as soon as he was inaugurated and took over a defunct, Obama-era department for legal legitimacy. It is working to ferret out fraud, waste, and abuse and has so far focused on headline-grabbing small waste like the plant watering contract while digging deeper into allegedly massive fraud at entitlement programs like Social Security.
In any case, speaking to Kudlow, Elon commented on the waste and explained how DOGE works. Introducing the subject, Kudlow asked, “So demystify this. How do you do it? Okay, how big is your team? Where did you recruit most of them from? And what is it that makes you choose, you know, the Treasury or Social Security or USAID. How does it work? Let the public know please, right?”
Responding, Elon told him that what DOGE does is follow the money to find the massive amounts of fraud that can be discerned in the outflows of money from federal agencies. He began by saying, “Well, we just basically follow the money. You know, we look at the President’s executive orders and we also follow the money.”
Continuing, he explained what USAID was up to, saying that there was “a lot of corruption” there. He said, “So we started looking closely at USAID, because they were completely violating the President’s executive orders to suspend foreign foreign aid. You know, what’s called foreign aid, but in our view, is a lot of corruption.”
Elon then went nuclear on the non-governmental organization (NGO) fraud, noting that those leftist organizations are some of the biggest fraudsters. He said, “So what we saw there is just a tremendous amount of money being sent to non-governmental organizations. But actually this, by the way, is, I think, one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world is government-funded nongovernmental organizations.”
Building on that, Elon said, “This is a gigantic fraud loophole where the government can give money to an NGO, and then there were no controls over that NGO, they given billions of dollars. In fact, we estimate 10s of billions of dollars to NGOs that are essentially scams.” He added that he ended that fraud, saying, “And by the way, I try to put a stop to that.”
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Later on, Elon gave an example of mundane but massive savings, saying, “And so, and then, with respect to the Treasury, for example, we the two main recommendations we suggested, which have now been implemented, was that any payments going out of the Treasury, especially the Treasury’s main payment computer, which is called Pam, things like payments account manager or something like that, but it’s like almost 5 trillion a year. So about a billion an hour that the payments be coded with the congressional appropriation, and that to be an explanation for the payment, very basic stuff. And just doing that, we estimate will save $100 billion a year.”
Further, a bit later on, he commented on the massive amount of fraud at Social Security and similar high-cost programs, along with what DOGE is trying to do about it. He said, “What really what we’re adding here is caring and competence and the there’s a massive amount of fraud, of basically, people submitting social security numbers for Social Security benefits, unemployment, Small Business Administration, loans and and medical where those are, those are, those are fake social security numbers.”
He added, explaining how DOGE is fighting that, “So they’re, well, they’ve stolen somebody else’s social security number, and we’re trying to put a stop to all of that. And that, that’s the number which is estimated to be on the order of 10% of federal expenditures, which is, you know, half a half a trillion dollars, a huge number.”
Watch Elon here, in a clip from the interview that one poster on X (formerly Twitter) described as a clip in which Mr. Musk comments “on government corruption and the great NGO scam…”:
Elon Musk on government corruption and the great NGO scam…👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/h4BqQA8aXS
— LorenC (@PG14500) March 12, 2025
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
