The interview with the billionaire Tesla CEO and members of his team at the Department of Government Efficiency initiative was a prime time opportunity for them to defend a project that has eliminated more than 120,000 jobs even as it has fallen short of his original savings targets.
Musk and the DOGE team spent much of the interview listing off examples of what they termed fraud in the federal government, though there was no way to confirm their findings and earlier claims have turned out to be false.
DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has saved the federal government $160 billion, a far cry from the $2 trillion Musk promised last year. Meanwhile, overall government spending has increased, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
President Donald Trump in a cabinet meeting Wednesday said Musk “wants to get back home to his cars,” despite saying that the billionaire is welcome to remain in his administration.
Musk reposted a tweet this week stating he was shifting into strategic management of DOGE, not leaving the initiative altogether. He said the team has engineered the cuts to make them difficult to reverse should Democrats eventually retake the White House.
“We’re trying to have it be such that the funding is removed so the grants are gone,” Musk said. “There’s a lot of work required to restart the waste and fraud. And that will at least slow it down.”
Musk said on a Tesla earnings call last month that he plans to devote more of his attention to the company, which reported a steep drop in sales and revenue in the first months of the year amid widespread protests over the DOGE cuts.
