Speaking to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sen. Cruz’s podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk explained yet another massive form of waste and fraud within the federal government and its massive spending apparatus, an issue he termed “magic money computers.”
As background, DOGE is currently digging through the federal government’s projects, contracts, and similar forms of spending taxpayer dollars in an attempt to find and cut waste, fraud, and abuse of a sort that many suspect is embedded within the government and causing huge losses and issues for taxpayers. So far, DOGE has found many jaw-droppingly wasteful contracts, such as a nearly $60k expenditure on watering just 8 plants, and has hinted at finding up to a trillion dollars of waste in Social Security.
As part of that attempt to sort through the federal government’s spending, DOGE has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payment system and is examining all the outflows of money recorded by the federal government. It was through the Treasury, it appears, that DOGE found information about the so-called “magic money computers.”
Such is what Mr. Musk seemed to indicate when on “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” during the midst of a rant about the problem of government inefficiency and the opacity of how it makes payments. Beginning, he said, noting that the computers seemingly aren’t networked and are able to create money out of thin air, “You would think the Government computers all talk to each other and are synchronized, an the numbers you see are real numbers, they’re not…”
Continuing, Mr. Musk noted that the computers seem to just process payments without actually using money the government has allotted, instead creating money with which they pay the bills. He said, “Magic Money Computers are computers that can just make money out of thin air. They just issue payments.”
Building on that, Mr. Musk noted where the problem seems to be mainly located and how many of them he and DOGE have so far found, a discovery that could help them in trimming the budget. He said, “They’re mostly at the Treasury, some are at HHS and some at State and DOD. We’ve found now 14 magic money computers.”
Concluding, the DOGE head emphasized the fact that the computers don’t seem to be hooked up to real accounts in which money sits and can thus be sent to those receiving funds from the government, but rather just create money to pay people. He said, “They just send money out of nothing.” Watch him here:
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Commenters on X (formerly Twitter) took the opportunity to call out what this could show about the inflation situation. One such commenter, for example, wrote, “Ultimately any money not backed by anything tangible is going to have this problem. That’s the real benefit of using hard money, it can’t just come into existence on a whim. It’s just numbers on a screen.”
Another commenter on X noted that the Treasury, and still less the DOD or other agencies, can’t just print money out of thin air, saying, “For those of you in the replies who are confused, the Treasury is not allowed to just print money. The Federal Reserve is allowed to do that, but the government is not allowed to do it.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video