Billionaire Elon Musk said in an interview on Monday that he believes his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will reach $1 trillion in savings.
Musk appeared on FOX Business Network’s “Kudlow” and touted DOGE’s progress, claiming the cost-cutting push has saved billions of dollars per day already.
“I’m just here trying to make government more efficient, eliminate waste and fraud, and so far we’re making good progress, actually,” Musk said. “Our savings at this point exceed $4 billion a day, so it’s very significant.”
Kudlow asked Musk if he thinks the effort will reach its goal of $1 trillion in savings, which was reduced from the initial goal of $2 trillion. Musk replied, “Yeah, I mean, unless we’re stopped, we will get to a trillion dollars of savings.”
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DOGE currently claims on its website that it has achieved an estimated savings of $105 billion through what it calls a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
It’s unclear how Musk is calculating the $4 billion per day figure given DOGE’s claimed savings on its website.
The $105 billion in estimated savings that DOE claims would amount to about $287.7 million per day over the course of a year. Dividing the claimed $105 billion in savings by the 50 days since Trump took office and DOGE was established amounts to $2.1 billion in savings per day.
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In the course of his interview, Musk said that while the inspectors general of federal agencies and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) have conducted audits of spending in various programs, changes haven’t been implemented to address problems identified.
“There have been many good audits done by inspector generals [sic] and by the Government Accountability Office, they just haven’t been implemented. Nothing’s been done,” Musk said.
“I think the GAO identified that there was 17 million dead people in the Social Security database several years ago. It’s now 20 million, but we didn’t do anything about it,” he explained.
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The Social Security Administration has noted that while there are many people over the age of 100 without a date of death in the Social Security database, those individuals aren’t necessarily receiving benefit payments.
A 2015 investigation by SSA’s inspector general found 6.5 million Social Security number holders aged 112 or older with no death information in the system, but noted that other records suggested the majority of them were deceased.
The report found that SSA issued payments to 266 of the number holders, though the IG indicated only 13 beneficiaries were likely age 112 or older, while in the 253 remaining cases there were discrepancies in SSA’s records that indicated the beneficiary wasn’t actually that old.
Following the review, the SSA decided not to proceed with adding presumed death information to the records because it would be costly to implement, provide little benefit to the agency and duplicate other information already available in government data exchanges.
