“We have a $2 trillion deficit and if we do nothing about this deficit, the country will go bankrupt. It is truly shocking that the interest on public debt alone exceeds the budget of the Department of Defense," said Musk, standing in the Oval Office with his boy X at the president's side.
Trump signed a regulation on Tuesday ordering all national agencies to cooperate with Muska DOGE squad to reduce costs. Although the text of the paper has not yet been published, according to Semafor portal, the decree states that the state institutions are ordered to present together with DOGE "large-scale worker simplification plans" and to limit the employment of workers only to "necessary posts".
In his first appearance at the White House, Musk — whose companies hold multi-billion-dollar contracts with government agencies, primarily with the Pentagon — disposed of journalists' questions about the controversial actions of his DOGE team, including possible conflicts of interest. He stated that since DOGE informed its activities on its website, this meant full transparency.
Conflict of interest in Elon Musk's activities
— Our actions are full transparent and full public. So if individual sees something, they can say, "hey, wait a second, possibly there's a conflict there," the billionaire said. At the same time, he acknowledged that “not always what he says will be true”, answering the question of the falsely promoted example of his spending $50 million “on condoms for Hamas in Gaza” by the USAID agency (in fact, the amount was lower, afraid Gaza state in Mozambique and was dedicated to combating AIDS).
At the same time, he claimed that his actions were aimed at "defensing democracy", due to the fact that so far America has been a bureaucracy, not a democracy. Both Musk and Trump claimed that his “audits” of individual agencies would bring tremendous savings, even a trillion dollars. Musk besides claimed that bureaucrats enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.
