Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has provided a timeline for when he expects to step away from his role in the Trump administration as chief adviser to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In an interview last week with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Musk said he was on pace to leave his post in May, 130 days after he began. He said the goal of slashing federal spending was averaging “$4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week,” with a goal of trimming $1 trillion annually.
If Musk’s rate of $4 billion per day remains consistent, it would total $520 billion within the 130 days he is legally permitted to work as an unpaid special government employee, the New York Post reported.
“This is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution. But at the end of the day, America is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future. But are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way?” he said. “Absolutely.”
“You know, one of the things I learned at PayPal was, you know who complains the loudest and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. It’s a tell. There are some NGOs that are crazy, like the $2 billion to Stacey Abrams’s NGO that basically didn’t exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government. She says, why? And there are many such cases like that,” he said.
“I think that most people, common sense-wise, would say, the fraud’s got to end. They’re concerned about the 94-year-old mother who skips a check or somehow doesn’t get what she’s supposed to get,” Baier noted..
“Right. And what we’re trying to say is actually that the 94-year-old grandmother is actually, as a result of DOGE’s work, going to get her check. She’s not going to be robbed by fraudsters like she’s getting robbed today,” Musk said.
“And the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those Social Security checks, that Medicare continues to work, without which we’re all doomed. And the reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do it, America is going to go insolvent. We’re going to go bankrupt. And nobody’s going to get anything,” he added.
“Unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink,” Musk told Baier. “That’s why we’re doing it.”
Aram Moghaddassi, a software engineer at DOGE, discussed the reforms being implemented at the Social Security Administration in response to reports of website issues affecting the 68 million Americans who receive retirement, disability, and survivor benefits.
“I’ll say the two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits — protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis — and also make the experience better,” the engineer said.
“When you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters” who are trying to steal payments, he said.
That led Musk to interject: “In fact, what we’re doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people, as a result of the work of DOGE, will receive more Social Security, not less. I want to emphasize that, as a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money.”
Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb and a fellow billionaire, discussed his work with DOGE on digitizing the retirement process for government employees, which is currently conducted on paper, limiting retirements to about 8,000 per month.
“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching the show tonight,” Gebbia said.
“We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience — beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”
