Until Thursday, most people have only known Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) through the scandals of its mostly young and male team as they have rampaged through the U.S. government with a metaphorical axe.
Its most well-known staffer, besides Musk, has been a 19-year-old high-school-grad coder affectionately known as “Big Balls” with a mysterious past, and a 24-year-old software engineer who was fired and rehired after racist tweets from an old social media account were discovered.
But the richest man in the world tried to present a new face of his government cost-axing endeavor on Thursday when he brought DOGE’s senior leadership out from the shadows for their first televised interview.
Surrounded by seven of the advisory team’s leaders — among them bankers, engineers, executives, and titans of industry — Musk was typically immodest about his work to reduce the federal government’s budget in a wide-ranging softball interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier.
“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 will be in much better shape,” he boasted, drawing a comparison between his team’s firing of National Park rangers and George Washington’s defeat of the British Empire.
The central theme of Musk’s pitch was that the U.S. government, and with it the country, will fall if he and his team do not succeed. In short, only DOGE can save America.
“If we don’t do this, we’re sunk,” he said. “Unless we’re successful, the ship of America will sink.”
Musk said that to achieve this feat, he would need to cut the deficit by a trillion dollars (as the Republicans strategize to cut taxes — and income to the nations — by $4.5 trillion).
“The government is not efficient, and there is a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services,” Musk insisted.
The interview appeared to have been aimed at fixing some of the damage from weeks of negative headlines for Musk’s team, which has moved quickly through numerous government departments, in some cases gaining access to highly sensitive information in its efforts to slash spending at the behest of President Donald Trump.
Baier did not raise in his interview a ruling by a judge that DOGE’s dismantling of USAID “likely violated the Constitution.” Or that children are already dying because of a halt in a program to provide AIDS medication. Or that many hundreds of thousands more may die.
He did, however, ask Musk about the recent chaos in Social Security. The agency, relied upon by 73 million Americans, was targeted by DOGE after Musk claimed without evidence that vast numbers of people were fraudulently claiming benefits — a claim that experts say is demonstrably false.
“We’re gonna make sure that the website stays online,” Musk replied curtly, eager to move on.
Baier gave each of Musk’s acolytes the opportunity to describe the great sacrifices they had made to join his mission. Seated around Musk like the bosses of McKinsey, they insisted they were just doing their patriotic duty.
Steve Davis, a longtime Musk lieutenant who worked at SpaceX, was introduced by Baier as the “chief operating officer of DOGE.” He described the mission of cutting costs in government as “incredibly inspiring.”
“I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that to have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing. And therefore the country going not bankrupt is a good thing that all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do,” he said.
It did not go unnoticed by Baier that many of the altruistic business leaders assembled before him were obscenely wealthy. It’s unlikely any of them have ever had to rely on a check or service from the government.
“You’re one of several billionaires here,” Baier noted as he introduced Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, who has been given the task of fixing retirement in government.
Gebbia decided to volunteer when he heard the retirement for government workers was managed by paper.
“We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems,” he explained, perhaps unaware that an Apple store is the perfect idea of hell for most retirees.
Anthony Armstrong, a former Morgan Stanley banker who now oversees the Office of Personnel Management, was concerned that “there’s a lot of money sloshing out the door.”
Musk may have shown a more professional face to the hitherto shadowy DOGE team, but he did little to address the damage he has done in slashing so quickly without even beginning to understand many of the services federal workers provide.
“They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. Which is not to say that we don’t make mistakes,” he said.
“If we would approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying, someone in baseball has got to bat 1,000 — that’s impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly. And we move on,” he insisted.
Musk has also done nothing to calm fears that he and his team of unelected bureaucrats, with little real oversight of their work, will not cause more collateral damage when the work on Social Security really begins.
“I think that most people, common sense-wise, would say the fraud’s got to end. They’re concerned about the 94-year-old grandmother who skips a check or somehow doesn’t get what she’s supposed to get,” Baier suggested to Musk.
“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, and the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks,” Musk replied.
But budget experts, the people who have done this before, say Musk cannot reach his target without touching entitlement programs like Social Security.
That means that either Musk, or grandma, will have to give.
