Elon Musk and a team from his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) told the nation last night just how much taxpayer money the government wastes.
DOGErs have already exposed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as a trough of free money for the far left. Millions of dollars went to promoting sexual perversion abroad.
But their interview last night with Fox News’s Brett Baier revealed that much more must be done to curb the waste. Examples: stopping federal loans to infants and updating computer systems that are some 50 years old.
The Waste
Noting that Musk wants DOGE to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion and reduce spending by 15 percent, Musk told Baier that the “sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government … is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more.”
A government survey that should have cost $10,000 by using SurveyMonkey instead cost almost $1 billion, Musk reported:
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.
Musk believes he can save $1 trillion in the 130 days he has to work for DOGE.
“Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week,” the Tesla tycoon said. “And so far, we are succeeding.”
Another big waste of money that Musk described was Small Business Administration loans going to infants.
More than $300 million, he said, “has been given out to people under the age of 11. Well, actually, to add to it, it’s $300 million under the age of 11 and over $300 million to over the age of 120,” Musk said.
The youngest beneficiary was nine months old.
Stanley Armstrong, formerly of Morgan Stanley, explained how bad things are at the Internal Revenue Service.
“You’ve got overstaffing,” he told Baier:
A good example of overstaffing would be the IRS has got 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and cell phones. So if you join the IRS, you get a laptop and a cell phone. You’re provisioned.
So if each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day, you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year, you can reprovision. Why would you have 1,400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone? The whole IRS could be handled once a month. So that doesn’t make any sense.
Tom Krause, chief executive officer of Cloud Software Group, discussed the Treasury Department, which, of course, supposedly watches the taxpayer’s dime.
“There’s $500 billion of fraud every year,” he told Baier. “There’s hundreds of billions of improper payments. And we can’t pass an audit.”
To explain the scale of government spending, Krause said 580 agencies have access to the Treasury. “Imagine, you’re a household. You have a bank account,” he said:
Everyone has an ATM card connected to that account. Everyone has a checkbook connected to that account. It’s not just your children. It’s not just your parents. It’s your in-laws. It’s your extended family. And they all can go to the account and disperse funds. No questions asked. No justification. No verification.
Wasteful Spending
DOGErs’ exposing all that is the reason far-left Democrats and many federal bureaucrats are so furious.
Out of the gate, as The New American reported last month, citing the Daily Mail, DOGErs exposed this madcap spending:
• $30 million to study AIDS among prostitutes and “transgenders” in South Africa since 2018;
• $1.5 million for a Serbian “LGBTQ” outfit to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities, by promoting economic empowerment of and opportunity for LGBTQI+ people in Serbia”;
• $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam;
• $47,000 for a “transgender” opera in Colombia; and
• $32,000 for Peru’s trans comic-book program.
GOP U.S. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa detailed even more:
• $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes;
• $2 million promoting tourism to Lebanon;
• $20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq;
• Sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week; and
• $1 million for risky research in Wuhan lab.
DOGE also found that no government agency uses even 50 percent of its office space, that federal buildings were empty and typically only 12 percent of office space was occupied. Less than 500 of the Department of Agriculture’s 7,400 employees used their office.
Social Security for Centenarians
But perhaps the most compelling evidence that the government is out of control was this DOGE discovery: Some 20 million centenarians are alive and well and in the Social Security database. 3.63 million are between 110 and 119, 3.8 million are ages 120 through 129, almost 4 million are 130 through 139, and about 3.5 million are 140 through 149.
Another 1.3 million are ages 150 through 159, and 448 are older than 190. One person found in the database was almost 400 years old.
Software engineer Aram Moghaddassi offered Baier a possible explanation:
“I’ll say the first thing that got me really excited about DOGE was learning basically the state of government computers,” he told Baier:
By some estimates, government IT costs about $100 billion, and it’s funding systems that are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are old.
