Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), previously made comments illustrating the “staggering” amount of fraud within the federal government. According to Musk, troubling issues exist within the U.S. government that fail to serve the U.S. taxpayers, which the Trump administration will fix.
Just several weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, Musk and DOGE have hit the ground running, exposing vast amounts of financial mismanagement at the federal level. Such actions to restore trust and transparency have been met with critical acclaim from the American people, who see the president following through on his campaign promises.
Back in October, Musk spoke on the campaign trail in Folsom, Pennsylvania, ahead of the election. “The amount of waste that happens with the federal government is really staggering. It’s a staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money,” he said, highlighting how big the problem is.
Musk maintained that all spending should be scrutinized to determine if it is beneficial for American citizens. “We have to say, Well, what does this do for the citizens of America? How is this good for people in America? That’s it’s their money,” he said. “For some weird reason, a lot of people in the state, or whatever the politicians, they seem to forget that money being spent is, is your money.”
The multi-billionaire continued, “And if it’s not spending, being spent in a way that is beneficial to the American people, it’s a misuse of the funds. I mean, there’s this, there’s a lot of money that’s being spent where we’re sort of illegals are getting more benefits than citizens like that that doesn’t make any sense.”
More recently, The America Tribune reported on the “utterly insane” findings within Social Security and other entitlements programs. “At this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR. It’s not even close,” he wrote.
Musk said in another post, “Just learned that the social security database is not de-duplicated, meaning you can have the same SSN many times over, which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD!! Your tax dollars are being stolen.” He further noted, “To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following: Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.”
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Watch Musk below:
He continued, “All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”
Musk concluded, “When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.”
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.