TRANSCRIPT: President Trump, Elon Musk Speak After DOGE Order Signing

I’ll ask Elon Musk to say a few words, and we’ll take some questions. Elon, go ahead.

ELON MUSK: Sure. So at a high level, if you say what is the goal of DOGE and I think a significant part of this presidency is to restore Regent to democracy. This may seem like, well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don’t have a feedback loop, we’d have to if you… Tell you gravitas can be difficult sometimes.

So, if there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?

If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the senate and the house, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public, the public’s elected representatives, the president, the house, and the senate decide what happens as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there aren’t some good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, but you can’t have an autonomous federal bureaucracy.

You have to have one that’s responsive to the people. That’s the whole point of a democracy. And so, if you looked at the founders today and said, what do you think of the way things have turned out? Or what 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 people. So it’s just something we’ve got to fix. And then we also got to address the deficit. So we’ve got a $2 trillion deficit. And if we don’t do something about this deficit, the country’s going bankrupt.

I mean, it’s really astounding that the interest payments alone on national debt exceed the defense department budget, which is shocking because we spend a lot of money on defense. And if that just keeps going, we’re essentially going to bankrupt the country. So what I really would say is, it’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It’s essential. It’s essential for America to remain solvent as a country, and it’s essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt.

DONALD TRUMP: And also, could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million?

ELON MUSK: Right. Well, we do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth, while they are in that position, which is, you know, what happened to USAID. We’re just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they’re very good at investing.

In which case, we should take their investment advice perhaps. But, just there seems to be mysteriously they get wealthy. We don’t know why. Where does it come from? And, I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at taxpayer expense.

That’s the honest truth of it. So, we’re looking at, say, well, if you look at, say, treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the do not pay list, that you don’t actually pay it. None of those things are true currently. So the reason that departments can’t pass audits is because the payments don’t have a categorization code. It’s like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building.

So you can’t reconcile blank checks. You’ve got comment fields that are also blank. You don’t know why the payment was made. And then we’ve got this truly absurd, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year before an organization to get on a do not pay list. And this we’re talking about terrorist organizations.

We’re talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation can take up to a year to get on the list. And even once on the list, the list is not used. It’s mind blowing. So what we’re talking here we’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present. So you said, like, well, how could such a thing arise?

That seems crazy. That if when you understand that really, everything is geared towards complaint minimization, then you understand the motivations. So if people receive money, they don’t complain, obviously. But if people don’t receive money, they do complain. And the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest.

So, then when you understand that, then it makes sense. Oh, that’s why everything just they approve all the payments at treasury. Because if you approve all the payments, you don’t get complaints. But now we are going to complain.

If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible approval manner, then that’s not okay. Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on the things that matter to the people. I mean, these things like, it’s just common sense. It’s not draconian or radical, I think. It’s really just saying, let’s look at each of these expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people?

And if it is, it’s approved. If it’s not, we should think about it. So, you know, there’s crazy things like just cross examination of Social Security. And we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now do you know anyone 150?

I don’t okay. This they should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They’re missing out. So, you know, that’s a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. It’s my guess.

Or they should be very famous. One of the two. And then there’s a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information. Well, why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it, and that they receive it quickly and accurately.

Also, another crazy thing. So, you know, one of the things is, we are trying to sort of right size the federal bureaucracy just to make sure that this obviously, they need to get a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently. So we’re saying, well, okay. Well, let’s if people can retire, you know, with full benefits and everything, that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything.

And then we were told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We’re like, well, why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine. And, like, what do you mean a mine?

Yeah. There’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork and you look at picture of this mine. We’ll post some pictures afterwards. And this mine looks like something out of the fifties because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it’s like a time warp.

And then the speed then the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire. Doesn’t that sound crazy? There’s, like, a thousand people that work on this. So I think if we take those people and say, you know what?

Instead of working in a mine shaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States, in a more useful way. So, anyway, so I think, you know, that’s an example. Like, at a high level, if you could say, how do we increase prosperity is we get people to do to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there’s a higher standard of living available for everyone. That’s the actual goal.

Questions from Reporters

ELON MUSK: Everyone’s very quiet, brother.

REPORTER: Your detractors, Mr. Musk I have to…

ELON MUSK: What?

REPORTER: Including a lot of Democrats.

ELON MUSK: I have detractors?

REPORTER: You do, sir.

ELON MUSK: I don’t believe it.

REPORTER: Say that you’re orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a nontransparent way. What’s your response to that criticism?

ELON MUSK: Well, first of all, you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted, you know, that we’d have a majority of the public voting for President Trump. Won the house, won the senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally.

The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times that, you know, people don’t get what they voted for. But in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for, and that’s what democracy is all about.

REPORTER: Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are, in effect, policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?

ELON MUSK: Well, 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. So all of our actions, which are maximally transparent.

In fact, I don’t think there’s been — I don’t know the case that where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization. And so, you know, and the kind of things we’re doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic. They’re not — we’re you know, what I mentioned, for example, about treasury, just making sure that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which are takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid. These are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that taxpayer money is spent well.

So it’s got nothing to do with, like, say, a contract for some company of mine at all.

REPORTER: But if there is a conflict of interest when it comes to you yourself, for instance, you’ve received billions of dollars in federal contracts. When it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president I know has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any sort of accountability check and balance in place that would provide any transparency for the American people?

ELON MUSK: Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, like, wait a second. Hey. You know what? That doesn’t that seems like maybe that’s, you know, that there’s a conflict there. I don’t like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.

REPORTER: Including you yourself.

ELON MUSK: Yes. But transparency is what builds trust, not simply somebody asserting trust. So not somebody saying they’re trustworthy, but transparency so you can see everything that’s going on. And then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It’s totally obvious.

DONALD TRUMP: And we thought that we would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest. And we watched that also.

He’s a big businessman. He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this. We don’t want an unsuccessful guy doing this. Now one thing also that Elon hasn’t really mentioned are the groups of people that are getting some of these payments. They’re ridiculous. And we’re talking about billions of dollars that we’ve already found. We found fraud and abuse. I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use, but in this case, fraud and abuse. It’s abusive because most of these things are virtually made up or certainly money shouldn’t be sent to them.

And you know what I’m talking about. It’s crazy. So, but we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars that we’ve already found. And now a judge who’s an activist judge, wants to try and stop us from doing this. Why? Why would they want to do that? I campaigned on this. I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt, and it is very corrupt. It’s very, very, it’s also foolish. As an example, a man has a contract for three months and the contract ends, but they keep paying him for the next 20 years, you know, because nobody ends a contract.

You get a lot of that. You have a contract that’s a three a three month contract. Now, normally, if you’re in a small and in all fairness, it’s the size of this thing is so big. But if you have a contract and you’re in a regular business, you end the contract in three months. You know, it’s a consult. Here’s a contract for three months, but it goes on for 20 years. Now the guy doesn’t say that he got money for 20 years. You know, they don’t say it. They just keep getting checks month after month.

And you have various things like that and even much worse than that, actually, much worse. And I guess you call that incompetence maybe. It could be corruption. It could be a deal is made on both sides, you know, where I guess the money he kicks I think he has a lot of kickback here.

I see a lot of kickback here. There’s a lot of kickbacks. Tremendous kickback because nobody could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts. So he has to get a kickback. So, that’s what I got elected for that and borders and military and a lot of things, but this is a big part of it.

And I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this horrible stuff going on. And we’ve already found billions of dollars, not like a little bit, billions, many billions of dollars. And when you get down to it, it’s going to be probably close to a trillion dollars.

It could be close to a trillion dollars that we’re going to find. That will have quite an impact on the budget. And you’ll go to a judge where they handpick a judge and he has certain leanings. I’m not knocking anybody for that, but he has certain leanings, and he wants us to stop looking. How do you stop looking?

I mean, we’ve already found it. We have a case in New York where a hotel has paid $59 million because it’s housing migrants, illegal migrants, all illegal, I believe.

ELON MUSK: And they were being paid twice the normal room rate at a 100% occupancy. Unbelievable. So it’s a racket.

REPORTER: Question.

ELON MUSK: If I may sort of just, going for the president’s comments, at a high level, okay, well, what how exactly how do — what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion? And it’s really two things, competence and caring. And if you add competence and caring, you’ll cut the budget deficit in half. And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get, you know, a daily proctology exam, basically.

Might as well just camp out there. So it’s not like I think I can get away with something. I’ll be scrutinized nonstop. And, but with support of the president, we can — we can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1, and then with deregulation because there’s a lot of regulations that don’t ultimately serve the public good. We need to free the builders of America to build.

And if we do that, that means I think, we can get the economic growth to be maybe 3, 4%, maybe 5%. And that means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. There’s no inflation in 2026. And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone’s mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, any their student debt, the monthly payments drop.

That’s a fantastic scenario for the average American. I mean, imagine they go down the grocery aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same, and their mortgage, all their debt payments dropped, how great is that for the average American?

DONALD TRUMP: We had no idea we’re going to find this much, and it’s open. It’s not, like, complicated. It’s not complicated. It’s a lot of work. You can’t believe it. A lot of work, a lot of smart people involved. Very, very smart people. But, it’s you’re talking about anyway, maybe $500 billion. It’s crazy the kind of numbers you use.

It’s really crazy. You know, normally, when you’re looking at something, you’ll find you’re looking for one out of a hundred. Here, you’re almost reversing it. You look for one that’s good. And you can look at the title, and you say, why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? And the public gets it. You know, the public gets it. You’ve seen the polls.

The public is saying, why are we paying all this money? This is for years this has gone on. Go ahead.

Wait. Go ahead.

REPORTER: Senator Rand Paul today said that DOGE cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress. Do you agree with that? Is that the plan?

DONALD TRUMP: I really don’t know. I know this. We’re finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse. If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it’d be I it’s fine with me. I think we’ll get the vote.

Although there’ll be some people that wouldn’t vote. And how could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence? Why would that happen? Why would even Congress want to do that? Now Congress if we do need a vote, I think we get a very easy vote because we have a track record now. We’ve already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption. A lot of corruption.

REPORTER: If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling? Will you comply with this?

DONALD TRUMP: Abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it.

But then what he’s done is he slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. You know, if a person’s crooked and they get caught, other people see that and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. So the answer is I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and will appeal.

But appeals take a long time, and I would hope that a judge if you go into a judge and you show them, here’s a corrupt situation. We have a check to be sent, but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us to have to give it and give it back to the taxpayer? I would hope a judge would say, don’t send it. Give it back to the taxpayer.

ELON MUSK: If I can add to that, what we’re finding is that a bunch of the fraud is not even going to Americans. So I think we can all agree that if there’s going to be fraud, it should at least go to Americans. But a bunch of the fraud rings that are operating in the United States and taking advantage of the federal government, especially in the entitlements programs, are actually foreign fraud rings. They’re operating in other countries and actually exporting money to other countries.

We should stop that. Again, this is big big numbers. We’re talking about $100 to $200 billion a year. Serious money.

REPORTER: Mr. Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud, that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza. But after fact check this, apparently, Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements? It wasn’t sent to Hamas, actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?

ELON MUSK: Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody’s going to bat a thousand.

I mean, any you know, we’re we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I’m not sure that’s something Americans would be really excited about. And that is really an enormous number of condoms when you think about it. But, you know, if it went to Mozambique and I’m like, okay. That’s not as bad, but still, you know, why are we doing that? That’s too bad.

REPORTER: Can you talk a little bit about how closely you’re working with agency heads as you’re directing these cuts? Do they have the how much input do agency heads have when you’re making these decisions?

ELON MUSK: We work closely with the agency heads. And, so there are sort of checks in place, so it’s not — I was just going in and doing things willy nilly. It’s in partnership with the agency heads. And, and I checked previously with the president to make sure that, you know, this is what the president wants to have happen.

So, you know, we talk almost every day, and I double check things to make sure this is something, Mr. President, you want us to do this? We’ll then we’ll do it.

REPORTER: USAID has been one of your main targets. Are you concerned at all that some of the cuts or that shutting that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to the United States?

ELON MUSK: So that’s an interesting example. So that’s something where we work closely with the State Department, and Secretary Rubio. And we have, for example, turned on funding for Ebola prevention, and for HIV prevention.

REPORTER: Correct.

ELON MUSK: And we are moving fast. So we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly.

REPORTER: So has a worthy cause, USAID?

ELON MUSK: I think that there’s some worthy things, but overall, if you say what is the bang for the buck, I would say it’s it was not very good. And there was far too much of what USAID was doing was influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day.

REPORTER: I think it’s just a follow-up to the, the Pentagon contracts. If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon, and the president’s directing you to look into the Department of Defense, is that conflict of interest —

ELON MUSK: We are going to do at the president’s request.

REPORTER: Does that present a conflict of interest for you?

ELON MUSK: No, because you’d have to look at the individual contract and say, first of all, I’m not the one, you know, filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX or someone who will be putting for the contract. And I’d like to say, if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value of money for the taxpayer, let me know because every one of them was.

REPORTER: The president said the other day that you might look at treasuries. Could you explain that a little bit? What kind of fraud or and that question goes to both of you. What kind of fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in US treasuries?

ELON MUSK: I think you mean the treasury department as opposed to treasury bills. Or…

REPORTER: You also referenced treasuries on Air Force One the other night.

ELON MUSK: Well, the as I mentioned earlier, really, the first order of business is to make sure we’re actually collecting… sorry for this. Although my son might enjoy this, but he’s sticking his fingers in my ears and stuff. So it’s been hard to hear sometimes.

Hey. Stop that. So, no. The stuff we’re doing with the treasury department is so basic, that you can’t believe it doesn’t exist already. So for example, like I mentioned, just making sure that when a payment goes out, it has to have the payment categorization code. It’s like, what type of payment is this? You can’t just leave the field blank. Currently, many payments that the field is left blank. We and you have to describe what’s the payment for, some basic rationalization. That also is left blank.

So this is why, you know, the Pentagon when’s last time the Pentagon passed an order? I mean, a decade ago, maybe, or whatever, really. And we want to just in order to actually pass audits, you have to have financial information that allows you to trace the payments. So, you know, and once in a while, the treasury has to test to pause payments, if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. Like, if a company or organization is on a do not pay list, we should not pay it.

I’m sure you would agree. Like, if it’s quite hard to get on that payment, the do not pay list, it means that this is someone that is just it’s like dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that kind of thing. We should not pay them. But currently, we do, which is crazy. We should stop that.

DONALD TRUMP: And by the way, hundreds, thousands of transactions like that. You know, we have a big team. And for the sake of the country, I hope that the person that’s in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge are allowed to do the right thing, namely make sure everything’s honest, legitimate, and competent. But we’re looking at just, when you look at USAID, that was — that’s one.

We’re going to look at the military. We’re going to look at education. They’re much bigger areas. But the USAID is really corrupt. I’ll tell you it’s corrupt. It’s incompetent, and it’s really corrupt. And I can’t imagine a judge saying, well, it may be corrupt, but you don’t have the right. You got elected to look over the country and to, as we say, make America great again, but you don’t have the right to go and look and see whether or not things are right that they’re paying or that things are honest that they are paying. And nobody can even believe there’s other people, law professors, they’ve been saying, how can you take that person’s right away? You’re supposed to be running the country, but we’re not allowed to look at who they’re paying it to and what they’re paying. We have massive amounts of fraud that we caught.

I think we probably caught way over a lot of billions of dollars already in, what, two weeks? And it’s going to go, to numbers that you’re not going to believe. And, much as I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it.

And the only way we’re going to catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is going to say you’re not allowed to look for it, that’s pretty sad for our country. I don’t understand how it could even work.

REPORTER: I’m sorry. Mr. Trump, can you personally guarantee that…

DONALD TRUMP: Which one?

REPORTER: The buyout program, the offer to federal workers? Can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid through September?

DONALD TRUMP: Money, but, they’re getting a good deal. They’re getting a big buyout. And what we’re trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people. We have office space. It’s occupied by 4%. Nobody showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave him a 5-year pass.

Some of them, 48,000 of them gave him a 5-year pass that for 5 years, you don’t have to show up to work. And let me tell you, this is largely much of this stuff is because of Biden. It’s his fault. He allowed this country what he did on our border. What he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with all of these contracts that have come out.

It’s a very sad day when we look at it. I can’t even believe it. But many contracts just extend and they just keep extending, and there was nobody there to correct it. And, that that cannot be — I can’t imagine that could be held up by the court. Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn’t have the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest. I mean, how can you have a country? You can’t have anything that way. You can’t have a business that way. You can’t have a country that way. Hey.

Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. We’ll be at the White House tonight at about 10:00. If you want to come over, you can say hello to him.

REPORTER: The US did anything in return?

DONALD TRUMP: Not much. No. They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually. I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed. They’ve lost millions of people. It was, in terms of soldiers, probably 1.5 million soldiers in a short period of time. We got to stop that war. And I’m interested primarily from the standpoint of death. We’re losing all those soldiers and the non-American soldiers, the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, but you’re probably talking about a million and a half.

I think I think we got to bring that one to an end. Okay? Thank you.

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