President Donald Trump on Friday said he’s letting the Elon Musk-helmed Department of Government Efficiency dig into the budgets of the Pentagon and the federal Department of Education to find wasteful spending in need of cutting.
Trump told reporters at a joint press conference alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that the billionaire’s cost-cutting initiative, which has rampaged through multiple federal agencies, would be taking a look at the $842 billion defense department ledger along with the 4,000-person Department of Education, which Trump has said he would like to eliminate from the executive branch.
“We’re going to be looking at Department of Education. We’re going to be looking at even our military. We’re going to be looking at tremendous amounts of money … being spent on things that bear no relationship to anything and have no value,” Trump said.
“We’re talking about trillions of dollars. It will be, in the end, trillions of dollars being absolutely wasted and perhaps illegally, I would say.”
When ask if there is any area of government that Musk has been told to avoid, Trump responded: “Well, we haven’t discussed that much.”
“I guess maybe you could say some high intelligence or something,” he added. “And I’ll do that myself if I have to.”
Less than a month into Trump’s second term, his alliance with Musk has resulted in the total collapse of America’s soft power apparatus with the attempted elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development over the last week.
Trump claimed, without evidence, that USAID — which has long been the point agency for foreign aid distribution by the United States — was “absolutely obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly” and was investing in “con jobs.”
“There’s nothing of value to anybody unless there’s a kickback scheme going on, which is possible,” he said.
He also said he’d personally instructed Musk to look into his two latest targets.
“We have very smart people going in, so I’ve instructed him go into education, go into military, go into other things as we go along, and they’re finding massive amounts of fraud, abuse, waste, all of these things,” he said.
“I will pick out a target, and I say: ‘Go in.’ There could be areas that we won’t, but I think everything’s fertile.”
