It’s hard to keep up with all the waste and fraud allegations coming out of the DOGE deep-dives into the labyrinth depths of federal funding swamps. Musk just went on Ted Cruz’s Verdict podcast and revealed some new twists.
Musk estimates that there is an 80/20 ratio of waste to fraud in the federal budget and says $1 trillion in annual savings is not outside the realm of possibility.
“You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes, okay? It’s very obvious, basic stuff. In every government department, and I say ‘every’ because we’ve not yet found a single exception, there are far too many software licenses and media subscriptions, meaning many more software licenses and media subscriptions than there are humans in the department. Like, an agency with 15,000 people might have 30,000 licenses,” Musk said. “We found entire situations of software licenses or media subscriptions where there were zero logins. And yet we were paying for it. Yes, the government was paying for thousands of licenses of software or media subscriptions, and no one had ever logged in even once. Or, like credit cards—you found the same thing with government credit cards. We found that there are twice as many credit cards as there are humans.”
“I still don’t have a good explanation for why this is the case. And these are $10,000-limit cards, so it’s a lot of money.”
“It’s like 80% waste, 20% fraud but you do have sort of gray areas. We saw a lot of payments going out of treasury that had no payment code, no explanation to the payment,” Musk said. “Like a contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut it off, so the company kept getting money. is that waste or fraud? Both.”
“One of the biggest scam/fraud hauls we’ve uncovered -which is crazy- is that the government can give money to a so-called ‘non-profit’ with very few controls and there’s no auditing subsequently of that non-profit,” Musk said. “They then give themselves lavish insane salaries, expense everything to the non-profit, buying jets and homes and all sorts of things.”
“This is happening at scale,” Musk said. “This is not just one or two, we’re seeing this everywhere. It’s insane.”
“You may think that these government computers all talk to each other—they synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s coherent, that the numbers you’re presented as a senator are actually the real numbers,” Musk offered. “They’re not.”
“I mean, they’re not totally wrong, but they’re probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases.”
“So, I call it a ‘magic money computer,’ any computer which can just make money out of thin air,” he said. “It just issues payments. And you said there’s something like 11 of these computers at the Treasury that are sending out trillions in payments? They’re mostly at the Treasury. Some are at HHS, some—there’s one or two at State. There’s some at DOD. I think we’ve found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing.”
“The government is run by computers. So, you’ve got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government,” Musk said. “So, when somebody, even when the President, issues an executive order, that’s going to go through a whole bunch of people until, ultimately, it is implemented at a computer somewhere. If you want to know what the situation is with accounting, and you’re trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases. Otherwise, you can’t figure it out—because what you’re doing is asking a human, who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor, who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer.”
How many of those “magic money computers” were directly transferring money to Democratic pockets?
It seems like it’s graft, fraud and corruption all the way down.
Here’s the full interview:
Tags: Budget, Democrats, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, fraud, Republicans, Ted Cruz, video, waste, Welfare State
Even a 1 to 1 gov credit card to employee would be too many. I work for my State DOT and while I have one for my job the overwhelming number of people in my department never have the need to purchase anything so don’t need or have one. For other departments they have even less need. The majority of the state credit cards are fleet cards, every vehicle has one for getting fuel, I’ve been told they can be used for a few other things like oil or wiper fluid but are not general use cards.