Elon Musk has revealed that his DOGE team has been getting ‘a lot’ of death threats as he took center stage at President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
The world’s wealthiest man, wearing a back “tech support” t-shirt under a sports jacket and his customary black “Make America Great Again” hat, stood in the White House Cabinet Room on Wednesday at Trump’s request after the president asked him to “say a few words” about the work he is doing for the administration.
Musk said in response that he calls himself “humble tech support” and said that description is a “literal” one because his DOGE group is working to “help fix the government’s computer systems.”
“Many systems are extremely old. They don’t communicate. They’re a lot of mistakes in the systems. The software doesn’t work, so we are actually tech support,” he continued before adding that his “overall goal” with DOGE is to cut the federal deficit — a responsibility assigned to Congress by the U.S. Constitution — because the U.S. currently spends more on debt servicing than on defense.
“We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we’re spending like, over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go become de facto bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing. It is an essential thing,” said the billionaire, who added for good measure that he is “taking a lot of flack and getting a lot of death threats” for his trouble.
The SpaceX founder, who is participating in DOGE under a ‘Special Government Employee’ designation that lets him remain in control of the multiple government contractors in which he has an ownership stake despite federal ethics laws, claimed that his work could eventually result in a cost savings he described as being as high as a trillion dollars — 15 percent of the federal budget — by cutting what he calls “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Recently, Musk has been pressing federal workers to respond a directive from the Office of Personnel Management to list five bullet points detailing their accomplishments over the previous week, a query that was met with resistance from multiple cabinet departments before a Monday deadline he’d set for workers to respond or risk termination.
Without any evidence, he claimed that the government-wide email was an attempt to determine whether people currently on federal payrolls are real people and not sham identities to whom no-show jobs are assigned.
“I think that email, perhaps, was first interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review,” he said.
“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people.”
There is absolutely no evidence that anyone who is deceased is actually on government payrolls, and neither Musk nor the White House has offered any evidence to support the outlandish claim.
Despite the resistance from some cabinet departments whose secretaries instructed workers not to respond to Musk’s email, the mogul turned Republican megadonor said another such query would be going out this week.
“We’re going to send another email. Our goal is not to be capricious or unfair. It’s we want to give people every opportunity to send an email. And the email could simply be what I’m working on is too sensitive or classified to describe, like literally just that would be sufficient,” he said.
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