PART 1: Bret Baier interview with Elon Musk and DOGE breakdown:
- The goal is to reduce the Federal Deficit by $1 trillion dollars
- Reduce the spending by 15% by eliminating waste and fraud
- 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services
- Timeframe to reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion dollars is 130 days
- The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It's mind blowing. “We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more, casually”
- The Government paid $1 billion dollars for a “simple survey” that should close no more than $10k. “A billion dollars for a simple online survey, do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing”
Real breakdown: ““We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day every day, 7 days a week. And SO FAR WE ARE SUCCEEDING.” That’s $1.4 TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR in savings by DOGE”
- DOGE does make mistakes, we correct them quickly, and we move on
- DOGE has a rocket scientist as part of the team
- Without DOGE the country would go bankrupt
- Minimum target of DOGE seems to be around $1 billion dollars but they do take on smaller amounts
- All cuts by DOGE are put on the DOGE website for maximum transparency
- Congress has a duty to address fraud and wasteful spending, they haven’t been doing that. “We try to keep Congress as informed as possible, The law does say that money needs to be spent correctly. It should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully”
- DOGE has “seen actually great support, at least from the Republican side of the House”
- Democrats “say what we're doing is somehow unconstitutional or not legal” (Democrats want to keep the fraud spending)
- Government documents will be digitized
- The current paper system is so inefficient only 8,000 government employees can be retired per month. Backlog of 6-9 months processing time
- Many processes in government look like they haven’t changed or been updated since the 1950’s
Social Security:
Elon Musk is not trying to eliminate Social Security, “2 improvements that we're trying to make to Social Security are:
- Helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis,
- Make the experience better”
“They get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.”
- Nearly half of all Social Security calls are fraud
- Updates to the Social Security website are coming, “The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts.” This will be fixed
- There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive
-This 15 million is a lot of fraud, “There’s no way to use those for good intentions. So one of the things the DOJ team is doing is carefully and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.”
HHS, Medicare, Medicaid and NIH
- HHS: Making sure we continue to have the best biomedical research in the world
- Making sure, which President Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid
New NIH Policy Proposal:
“NIH as an example, today, if you're a NIH researcher and you get $100 grant at your university, today you get to spend 60% of that and your university spends 40% of that.
The policy that we're proposing to make is that you get to spend 85% of that and your university spends 15%
So that's more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures.