Musk tells grandmothers not to worry about Social Security and insists only DOGE can save America
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.
