TRANSCRIPT
"Waste is pretty much everywhere. People ask 'how can you find waste in DC?' I'm like 'Look, it's like being in a room and there's targets.' The walls, the roof and the floor are all targets. So it's like you're going to close your eyes and shoot in any direction. You can't miss. So it's pretty wild. You just push on things a little bit and you save billions of dollars. Just a little bit. It's wild."
In less than two months, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, has inserted itself into at least 20 US federal agencies.
Classified as a special US Government employee and senior advisor to the White House, the world's richest man says he's on a mission to rid government agencies of fraud, corruption, and wasteful spending.
Since Donald Trump came into office on January 19th, Mr Musk and DOGE employees have set in motion a whirlwind of changes and cuts.
So, what exactly have Elon Musk and DOGE done so far?
Dr John Hart is an Emeritus Professor and specialist in US government and politics at the Australian National University.
He says what Elon Musk is doing is unprecedented, and it's causing chaos.
"There have been lots of buddies of presidents who have consulted with presidents in an unofficial capacity who may have been influential while not holding any government appointment, but nothing like Musk who's been charged with a central plank of Trump's election platform, which is cutting the size of American government. And Musk has taken that on with a vengeance. It's proved to be a very powerful position because what Musk does and what he says goes, because he has the backing of the President."
Among the departments already being targeted by DOGE are education, health, defence, weather, aviation, aid, social security, and emergency management - just to name a few.
The DOGE team is made up of around 40 people with little to no experience in government and includes many former and current employees of Elon Musk.
Mostly men and mostly software engineers, the team includes people as young as 19, like recent high school graduate Edward Coristine, who was fired from a previous internship for leaking confidential information to a competitor.
So far, the team has been given unprecedented powers in the White House, with entire government agencies dismantled and tens of thousands of workers fired or put on leave.
Following an influx of complaints from White House officials and agency heads, Mr Trump says Mr Musk's power is not without limits but that so far he's doing a good job.
"No, no. I think they've done an amazing job. They've done an amazing job. And look at what they found. I read it the other night in the speech. I mean, they found these things were billions of dollars has been poured down the drain to things. That's about contracts, where billions and billions of dollars was just thrown out the window. It probably got kickbacks. I'm sure there were tremendous kickbacks for the people that authorised those contracts."
Elon Musk says his cost-cutting initiatives aim to find US$1 trillion in savings.
But so far, how much has he actually saved?
According to the official DOGE website, estimated savings are at around US$105 billion.
However, reporting by the New York Times says these claims, posted to what DOGE calls it's 'wall of receipts', are unverifiable and often riddled with errors.
"I should say, also we will make mistakes, we won't be perfect but when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So for example, with USAID. One of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention."
The New York Times says in the past few weeks, several of the biggest claims posted to the wall have been removed or corrected, including one that boasted an US$8 billion cut, when in reality it was US$8 million.
With repeated errors, overblown saving estimates, minimal transparency and such high-speed changes, Dr Hart believes Elon Musk's method is deliberate.
"Well, there's an intention to cause chaos generally, because the theory that they're working on is that in order to reform government, you need to destroy it first and then build it up afterwards in a completely different way. They haven't given any indication of how they're going to rebuild government. They're just destroying it by very, very quick decisions based on ignorance. And I mean, the immediate effect is, I guess, to establish a kind of a deadlock in government where public servants, civil servants, who are left there will basically not do anything because they are frightened of offending Musk and Trump. And it's going to be a real problem."
As Dr Hart says, the work being done by DOGE is having a major impact on the US federal workforce, with tens of thousands of jobs cut and many more people being urged to resign.
In recent weeks, DOGE has sent emails to federal employees instructing them to respond with five things they've achieved in the last week.
Elon Musk says the email, which employees in multiple agencies have been advised not to respond to, was simply a way to identify fraudulent employees in the system.
"I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse? And two neurons. So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email."
Despite his comment, Elon Musk has posted on his social media platform X that a failure to respond will be considered a resignation.
In recent statements, Donald Trump has claimed that so far, 75,000 federal workers have accepted what the administration is calling 'deferred resignations'.
Elon Musk, who is unelected, says the cuts are about removing parts of the bureaucracy that are opposed to the president and the cabinet.
"What we're really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we're finding is that there's an unelected bureaucracy. Speaking of unelected, there's a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet."
One of the earliest targets of DOGE was USAID, the US government's key foreign aid agency.
In a matter of weeks, only a small fraction of USAID employees remain on the job and US$60 billion in assistance overseas was reportedly slashed, upending decades of US policy.
Jared Mondschein is the Director of Research at the US Studies Centre.
He says the Trump administration knows cuts to foreign aid are unlikely to damage approval ratings.
"If you look at polling on what Americans think the US government spends on foreign aid, it's often exponentially higher than what it actually is. It actually less than 1 per cent of the entire US government budget but many Americans think it's as much as a third of the US budget. And so when you know your average Americans who don't necessarily pay a lot of attention to these things hear that foreign aid is being cut I don't think that the Trump administration sees that as a liability. It's also not one that really has much of an impact on Americans."
Gaining access to the confidential data of millions of Americans, DOGE is also raising serious concerns about the legality of what it's doing.
Elon Musk says the US social security benefits system, which reaches an estimated 67 million Americans, is riddled with fraud.
Despite requests for access to highly sensitive social security data being denied to DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are still making claims, now debunked, that there are tens of millions of dead people receiving payments.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden says proposed cuts to the social security system will lead to its collapse.
"In just the past week, the DOGE-appointed commissioner has taken the following actions: allowed DOGE unfettered access to Americans' health records, bank account information, and tax data - the 'Fort Knox' of Americans' sensitive personal information; wiped out Social Security's most experienced employees and continued to pressure more to resign when the agency is already in a 50 year staffing low; proposed shuttering field offices across the country and closing more than half of the regional offices."
With the fires in Los Angeles and Hurricane Helene in recent memory, cuts to emergency management agencies and the national weather service are also causing concern.
A former employee at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, Henrick Simoes, says the cuts are making America less safe.
"I hope the American people will understand, hopefully from all the media coverage that this is getting is that, yes, NOAA impacts every aspect of people's lives in America, right. I think a lot of people know NOAA for the weather warnings and hurricane tracking and tornado warnings. And that is all super important. That stuff saves lives. And don't get me wrong, that is going to be impacted."
Despite a decline in American confidence in airline safety after multiple fatal crashes on US soil, cuts are also being made to hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration, including those with roles in safety.
Shortly after the deadly collision at Reagan National Airport in January, Mr Trump was quick to cast blame on the FAA's diversity hiring practices.
In response, the aviation authority has clarified that diversity programs don't apply to air traffic control positions.
But Donald Trump says the cuts are about getting rid of those he calls 'useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce'.
"We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender."
Across the US, current and former federal workers workers have been gathering in protest of DOGE.
In Washington, ahead of Donald Trump's first address to Congress since starting his second term, a group of Democrats joined federal workers in condemning the cuts.
Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland says the cuts are not about efficiency.
"If you cared about efficiency, you wouldn't start by firing the inspector generals. That's right. These are the independent watchdogs who look out for waste, fraud, and abuse. In fact, that's what you would do if you were going to open the door to more waste, fraud and abuse. Right?"
DOGE now faces at least 11 legal challenges to its actions so far, all claiming violations of the Privacy Act of 1974.
But with Congress now dominated by Trump allies, some fear the powers of the courts are not enough.
Dr John Hart says if guardrails like the Supreme Court are not properly in place, these changes could be disastrous.
"I think Trump presents a different situation for the court because I think he will jack up against Supreme Court decisions that go against what he wants to do with the bureaucracy, particularly as he has a almost totalitarian view of the power of the President over the US government bureaucracy."
But with concerns over the speed and volume of cuts, Dr Mondschein also says it's unlikely that these cuts will continue at this pace.
"It's important to note that I don't think that we are going to be seeing four years of cuts in this way. I think the USAID is going to be coming back. It's going to be different than what it was before but but as I said that they would much rather you know basically cut everything and build up from the bottom than to just keep everything and slowly cut piece by piece and so I think we should remember that this, we won't be in this situation for the entirety of the Trump administration."
