Elon Musk slammed the federal government in a recent appearance at a Wisconsin town hall event where he emphasized “ghost payments,” which are funds disbursed to retired or reassigned contracting officers due to forgotten payment streams. Elon characterized “ghost payments” as a wasteful “money faucet,” and promised to bring the problem to an end.
For context, Musk is the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration initiative tasked with implementing cost-cutting measures across the federal government. Acting on the president’s mandate, DOGE has focused on ending government waste and fraud by investigating government contracts.
Such was shown when Musk explained how the government wastes billions in taxpayer dollars. He began, “It’s worth pointing out, like it’s actually difficult to you have to recalibrate how dumb things can be, because it’s the government, you know, frankly, it’s like dumber than you think it could possibly be.”
Building on the point, Elon blasted the government for rampant waste. He added, “So, you know, like, for example, there, we found there were a whole bunch of what I call ghost payments going out where the government contracting officer had retired or changed jobs or were dead, or, I don’t know, they were not around anymore, and they forgot to turn off the payment stream to some company.”
Continuing, he explained how organizations contribute to this problem. Musk said, “And it’s like leaving the money faucet on. And you leave the house, you know, and it’s just the money, plus it keeps going, and it’s a pretty rare organization that will complain about receiving money. So organizations, then you’re like, is that waste or fraud?”
Then Musk revealed his solution. The tech founder said, “I mean, the government did send them the money, but they didn’t deserve it. So then, well, okay, we should turn off the money spigot if they if the contract is over. You know, type of thing. So one of the things that we made a recommendation to the Treasury was that the payment classification codes and the explanation for the payment be mandatory fields, so that they just have a name attached.”
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Adding to this point, he debated whether this behavior was fraudulent. Musk explained, “So we could just ask the person who approved the payment, is this payment a good payment? Does this make sense? This is the kind of thing that is normal for individuals and for companies, but that was not the case.”
Then Elon commented on the unprecedented nature of this waste. He said, “So the reason why the government could not pass an audit was because the information did not exist that would be required to pass an audit, like, it was literally impossible, because you just had all these blank checks going out with no explanation and no payment code.”
Concluding his remarks, Musk explained how much money his proposed changes could make. He added, “So how are you supposed to do an audit? It’s literally impossible. So that’s what I mean by like, it’s very basic stuff, like, we just want the congressional appropriation payment code to be mandatory, and a very short explanation. We’re not even going to judge what the explanation is, but that there be any explanation at all, and a name attached is, was like revolutionary, and my guess is this will probably save $100 billion a year.”
Featured image from embedded video