President Donald Trump said in remarks airing Sunday that Elon Musk, who is presiding over a purge of US government jobs, will help find “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” in federal agencies.
Speaking in a Fox News interview set to air before the Super Bowl football championship, Trump said the American people “want me to find” waste and that Musk, the world’s richest man and the leader of the president’s cost-cutting efforts, has been “a great help” in rooting out unnecessary spending.
“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse. And, you know, the people elected me on that,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, according to excerpts.
During his three weeks in office, the president has unleashed a flurry of executive orders aimed at slashing federal spending. He has appointed SpaceX and Tesla boss Musk to lead his federal cost-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
But while the administration has highlighted several government projects Trump believes should be ended or curtailed, evidence of widespread illegal fraud has not been presented.
Musk, a top Trump donor and ally, has already taken unprecedented steps to shut down the US Agency for International Development, laying off thousands of employees. The DOGE reform team also has triggered alarm among critics by gaining access through the US Treasury to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.
On Friday a federal judge ordered a temporary pause to the administration’s plan to put 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave. A day later another US judge issued an emergency order blocking DOGE from accessing Treasury Department payment systems that contain Americans’ sensitive data.
Trump said in his interview that over the next day or so he will order Musk to turn his government scalpel to the Department of Education, a frequent target of Republican ire.
“Then I’m going to go to the military,” Trump said, reiterating his call for a review of spending at the Pentagon, whose budget totals some $850 billion.
Musk’s role faces criticism in part because his companies have had billions of dollars in contracts with the US government — more than $20 billion, according to House Democrat Mark Pocan.
– ‘Evisceration of democracy’ –
Asked whether he trusts Musk to fairly root out wasteful spending, Trump appeared to assert that the wealthy entrepreneur and his businesses are not benefiting financially through Musk’s work with DOGE.
“He’s not gaining anything,” Trump said.
Democrats have lined up to slam Trump’s various efforts, including Senator Chris Murphy, who on Sunday warned of an “assault on the Constitution” and said Trump was ushering in a “billionaire takeover of government.”
“The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies. That is the evisceration of democracy,” Murphy told ABC News talk show “This Week.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, the top Republican in Congress, has repeatedly downplayed concerns that Trump is exceeding his authority or rushing too quickly to overhaul the federal government, including agencies like USAID.
“I’m not uncomfortable with the pace of this,” Johnson told “Fox News Sunday.”
The speaker, who is to watch the Super Bowl with Trump inside a New Orleans stadium suite, described Musk as “an outside auditor” whose team is uncovering “incredible abuses of the public fisc,” referring to the total amount of money a government has to spend.
Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz declined to say Sunday whether he believed it was a conflict of interest to have Musk, whose companies hold government defence contracts, oversee cost-cutting at the Pentagon.
“Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers,” Waltz told NBC of Pentagon expenses.
“We do need great minds. We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process,” he said, adding that “all of the appropriate firewalls will be in place.”
AFP
