Speaking in a powerful interview with Nikhil Kamath about what he learned while running DOGE, Elon Musk revealed how the government had, before he was there, engaged in horrible business practices that made life way too easy on fraudsters who were trying to scam the government into wasteful spending, noting that simple changes cut out much of that fraud.
Explaining as much when asked what he learned as the head of DOGE, Elon described it as being a “very interesting” experience, saying, “Well, it was, like a very interesting side quest, you know, because I just got to see, like a lot of the workings of the government. And, you know, there’s, there’s been quite a few efficiencies.”
Giving an example of one of the most basic efficiencies that was made, and one that saved tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars a year, Elon explained, “I mean, some of them are very basic efficiencies, like just adding in requirements for federal payments that that any given payment must have an assigned congressional payment code and a comment field with something in it that’s more than nothing like that.”
Explaining how it saved a massive amount of money, he said, “That trivial, trivial seeming change, my guess is, probably saves 100 billion dollars, or even $200 billion a year, because there were also, there were the massive numbers of payments that go were going out with no, no congressional payment code and with nothing in the comment field, which makes auditing the payments impossible.”
Adding to that, he noted how bad the Department of War’s record keeping was, saying, “So if they say, like,’ Why can the Defense Department, or now the Department of War, why can it not pass an audit just because the information is not there?’ the information necessary to pass an audit does not exist, is the issue.”
Still not done, he noted that DOGE just did basic, common-sense things that the government had bizarrely avoided doing until then. He said, “So a bunch of things DOGE did were just very common sense, things that would be normal for any organization that cared about financial responsibility. That’s, that’s, that’s most of what was done, you know, and still going on, by the way, those are still happening.”
Noting that the fraudsters went berserk over his decisions that cut fraud, he said, “But it turns out, when you stop fraudulent and wasteful payments, the fraudsters don’t, you know, confess to us, they actually start yelling all sorts of nonsense that you’re stuffing essential payments to need needy people. But actually you’re not.”
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Adding to the sort of waste that could be discerned and cut out because of DOGE’s simple changes, he then said, “You know, I, we get this thing, like saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to send this thing for whatever . . . this is going to children in Africa.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but then why are the wiring instructions for Deloitte Nutrition, Washington, DC? Because that’s not Africa.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video