I interviewed Elon Musk yesterday in the Indian Treaty Room at the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House.
He was open, honest, transparent, and committed to preventing this country from falling deeper into an entitlement state that will wind up in bankruptcy.
He has been subjected to extraordinary criticism from Democrats and their left-wing allies.
But President Donald Trump, time and again, has given Elon his full and complete backing.
And although Musk is not really a political man, he understands perfectly well that the entitlement state – shot through with waste, fraud, and corruption – is essentially the Democratic Party feeding at the taxpayer trough, and attracting illegal immigrants. Spot-on analysis from a non-politician.
Musk is a man on a mission.
I asked him if he heard a call to action. He easily agreed, and told me his wake-up call was seeing that America’s interest payments on the debt now exceed the entire military budget. The mission is simple – keep America from going bankrupt.
Musk’s team at DOGE numbers a hundred so far, but he intends to drive it up to 200.
Their audit has already spread to most of the federal agencies according to Elon, something I did not realize.
He’s got a website at DOGE.gov, which ensures the total transparency of his operation.
If you want to look under the hood at what Elon and his team are doing, just go to his website, where they are reporting line-by-line every contract they cancel, every lease they tear up, and score each agency based on how much they’ve cut.
As he said to me, if you disagree with our recommendations, just tell us exactly which line you object to.
We’ve had government audits before. For example, the GAO last year did an audit that estimated over $500 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse. But no one ever actually acted on this.
Musk is aiming for $1 trillion. And Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought told me that the DOGE savings will be implemented into a rescission package that will strike out Congressional authorizations – an action that needs only simple majorities in the House and Senate in order to enact.
Musk told me he’s acting as a consultant to the Cabinet secretaries throughout the government. Just recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio adopted over 80% of the DOGE recommendations to cancel most of USAID.
And here’s the thing: Musk has taken tremendous criticism, undoubtedly because Democrats and their allies don’t want to lose their foothold in the permanent ultra-liberal bureaucracy that Mr. Musk is tearing down.
Here’s what he said:
The President is the elected representative of the people. And if the President cannot get things implemented as a reflection of the will of the people, then what we have is not a democracy. We have a bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, his life has been threatened on the Internet, several of his electric charging stations have been set on fire, at least one Tesla dealership got shot up with live bullets – though fortunately no one was there at the time. Other Tesla dealerships have been subjected to protests and demonstrations.
Even he acknowledges that his businesses have probably suffered, while he spends his time in the White House. But he remains committed.
He told me he was going to go at least another year, maybe longer.
And then, finally, I put a question to him that had nothing to do with DOGE. I simply asked if he will bring back our astronauts, left stranded in space by Joe Biden. His answer? No hesitation: yes. We’re going to get them back.
Wow. A dedicated patriot, indeed.
