Concerned about whether the world’s richest man has the power to unilaterally shut down federal agencies or cut off your social security benefits at will? He says that’s probably because you’re committing fraud against the government.
SpaceX founder and Republican megadonor turned Trump White House adviser Elon Musk made the outrageous claim that no one should complain about his White House Department of Government Efficiency making cuts to federal programs except those whose interest in them isn’t legitimate during an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier alongside members of his DOGE team on Thursday.
Speaking from a television set inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Musk described his efforts since joining the Trump administration — shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research grants and firing thousands of federal employees under false pretenses — as “a revolution” that could be “the biggest revolution in government” since America broke away from the British empire at the end of the 18th Century.
He also claimed that absent his work, the U.S. government would soon be “involvement” and predicted that his rampant cutting would lead to “a fantastic future.”
Not everyone agrees. Multiple federal judges have ordered a stop to the actions his team has taken, including reversing the mass firings perpetrated by DOGE during the first months of the second Trump administration, and Musk himself has been called out for pushing false interpretations of government data to justify his slashing approach to cutting federal spending.
Democrats and nonpartisan good government groups have also accused him of ignoring Congressional appropriations, which have the force of law, and stoking confrontations with the aim of having the Supreme Court ultimately rubber stamp a massive expansion of presidential power to withhold funds to disfavored programs.
But the centibillionaire industrialist dismissed the concerns of his detractors as evidence of their illegitimacy, citing his experience while starting the payment processor PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
”One of the things I learned PayPal was that … you know who complains the loudest and the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters,” he said.
Musk then repeated a false claim about former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams receiving approximately $2 million from a green energy fund authorized by Congress during the Biden administration and said the complaints about DOGE cuts are a “crazy tell.”
“There are many such cases like that,” he said.
