WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative will look at the Defense Department’s massive budget after making significant cuts at other federal agencies — most notably the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — while charging that critics of the effort “don’t love our country.”
“Pentagon, Education, just about everything. We’re going to go through everything,” Trump said at a joint White House press conference with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
“It was so bad, with what we just went through — with this horrible situation we just went through, and I guess 97% of the people have been dismissed,” Trump said, referring to massive headcount reductions at USAID that were due to take effect at 11:59 p.m. Friday.
“It was very, very unfortunate. You’re not going to find anything like that, but you’re going to find a lot. And I’ve instructed him to go check out Education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad,” the president went on.
The Pentagon has the largest amount of federal discretionary spending — and an infamous history of overpayments, such as spending $10,000 on toilet seat covers for Air Force cargo planes, an outlay which was ended in 2018 after it became public.
Trump added, in reference to the sweeping USAID grant and staffing cuts: “I don’t think proportionally you’re going to see anything like we just saw.”
Musk’s DOGE initiative has seen a group of young staffers poring over spending at agencies, with the world’s richest man spotlighting many cases of alleged waste on X, which he owns.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO expects to lead the DOGE crusade for about four months, he told a JP Morgan conference during a remote appearance Friday, The Post’s Charles Gasparino reported.
Musk added that he hopes to trim $2 trillion from the federal government’s nearly $7 trillion budget, though he said shortly before Trump took office that would be “the best-case outcome,” adding: “If you try for two trillion, you have a good shot at getting one.”
He said that he was not appearing at that conference in person due to “death threats” and that he’s taken to sleeping on the couch of his office, apparently referring to the White House complex.
Trump said in the Oval Office earlier Friday that USAID’s spending was mostly “corrupt or ridiculous” and added that “the whole thing is a fraud.”
“Elon is doing a great job. He’s finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste,” the president said before offering new insights into how Musk’s roving and murky cost-cutting initiative is working.
“I’ll tell him to go here or there and he does it,” Trump explained. “He’s got a very capable group of people.
“They’ll ask questions and they’ll see immediately, if somebody gets tongue-tied, that they’re either crooked or don’t know what they’re doing.”
The president repeated that: “I will pick out a target and I’ll say, ‘Go in.’ There could be areas that we don’t, but I think everything’s fertile. You know, we’re a government. We have to be open.”
Semafor reported Thursday that another future target of DOGE is the Social Security Administration, which administers retirement and disability benefits.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the report, but earlier Friday Trump insisted Social Security benefits “will not be touched.”
The president, however, noted that illegal immigrants would be cut off if found to be receiving benefits.
Democrats have railed against Musk’s initiative — with lawmakers protesting outside the Education Department Friday afternoon after reports swirled that it would be next to be pared down.
Asked about the protest, Trump groused: “I see Maxine Waters, a low-life, I see all these people, they don’t love our country.”
