At his town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Sunday night, Elon Musk pointed to Democrats' government efficiency goals in the 1990s to defend DOGE.
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00:00First, I would like to apologize on behalf of America for the idiots you have to deal
00:07with for what you're doing for us to improve our country.
00:10Second of all, my question is, what is your opinion on the Federal Reserve and do you
00:15have any intentions of doing anything with that?
00:18And the Fed!
00:19Yeah.
00:20I don't know, I always wanted to say that, you know.
00:29I mean, I think there's like 20,000 people that work at the Fed, it seems pretty high.
00:33In fact, there's a lot of people that work at the Fed and it seems like, why do we have
00:37so many people at the Fed and what do they do?
00:40And you know, sometimes I wonder which one would win, you know, the Federal, for interest
00:47rates, the Board of the Federal Reserve or a Magic 8-Ball?
00:53And I'm like, I think the Magic 8-Ball might win, you know.
00:57So then I'm like, well, the Magic 8-Ball is a lot cheaper.
01:02So, you know, it's like you shake it, it says, check back again later, I'm like, okay.
01:11Same thing.
01:15But I think we, what really matters is that government spending is not far in excess of
01:25government revenue.
01:26That's a fundamental issue that we have, where we have a deficit of $2 trillion and we have
01:33interest payments that now exceed the entire budget of the military.
01:39In fact, that was a big wake-up call for me, was when the amount of money that we're paying
01:43national debt interest exceeded the Defense Department budget.
01:47I'm like, the Defense Department budget is very big and interest is higher than that
01:51and climbing.
01:52That's a disaster.
01:54You know, so the very simple, straightforward goal of the DOJ team is to get rid of waste
02:03and forward.
02:04It's mostly waste.
02:05It's, or depending on how, you know, I'd say it's probably 80% waste, 20% forward, something
02:09like that.
02:10But it's a trillion dollars, so that's still a lot.
02:15And it's, you know, it's got to, you know, it's got to be...
02:27We got another sore sleeper agent there?
02:30USA!
02:31USA!
02:32USA!
02:33USA!
02:34So, I mean, to be clear, the very simple thing we're doing, and we post everything publicly
02:55on the DOJ website, which is, it's just a look at every expense and say, is this actually
03:03a good use of your taxpayer dollars?
03:07That's it.
03:08It's not, it's not super complicated.
03:14And the thing that's pretty wild, this is why I like, I say, like, you know, I used
03:17to be a Democrat, like, and so like, and if you listen to the speeches of Clinton and
03:24Gore in the 90s, when they were going on about reducing waste and fraud, it literally,
03:31you wouldn't be able to tell the difference of, like, who said it, DOJ or Clinton-Gore.
03:36You can't even tell the difference.
03:37It sounds exactly the same.
03:39It's wild.
03:40So we're really just trying to restore common sense to government and say, like, let's not
03:47waste your money, and let's make sure it's spent well.
03:50And that's it.
03:52In trying to save a trillion dollars of expenditures, what we're saying is, of the seven trillion
03:56in government spending, let's try to see, let's see if we can make it 15%, 1.5% more
04:04efficient.
04:06And I'm confident that we can.
04:10That's actually not a huge bar, by the way.
04:13So, and when you see the, when you see the crazy things that the government is spending
04:24money on, you can see a list of some of them, you know, like, I don't know if we should
04:29be spending money on transgender comic books in Peru.
04:32That doesn't seem like an ideal thing to spend your money on, you know?
04:37Why would we do that?
04:39If somebody in Peru wants to do that of their own accord, that's fine, but it shouldn't
04:43be your money that does it.
04:45So it's just, and, you know, we shouldn't be paying rent on empty buildings, and, you
04:51know, if people, if, I do think there is a role for government, but we just need to make,
04:57we're just going to, we're just going through and saying, and doing what I would call, like,
05:00an excellent and necessary and reasonably trusted review of organizations and personnel.
05:10So is this person doing a good job?
05:13Great.
05:14Is the role necessary?
05:15If so, that's good.
05:16And are they reasonably trusted, meaning they're not a psycho?
05:19Like we're not talking about, like, political affiliation, just that they're not crazy.
05:25So, you know, how much wrong with that?
05:29I'm like, sounds super normal to me.
05:32So that's it.