Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Talk About Why Fraud Happens So Easily in the Federal Government

Fox News Senior Correspondent and host of "Special Report" Bret Baier

 sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team on Thursday. This is a step up from the individual interviews done with Musk and one or two of the members. While their work overlaps all of the government agencies, each DOGE member spoke to the findings at particular agencies like the Social Security Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of the Interior. 

Baier kicked off his questioning with Musk, asking what are the DOGE budgetary savings goals and what he thinks he's achieved thus far? 

MUSK: Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So, from a nominal deficit of two trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to one trillion. Or looked at in total federal spending, to drop the federal spending from seven trillion to six trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud and reduce the spending by 15 percent. Which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient and there's 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. In fact, making it better. 

Baier asked, "What's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?"

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It's astonishing, it's mind-blowing. We routinely encounter waste of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

While the American people had no concept of the details, many of us have known for decades that this was the case. Worse, that prior administrations and lawmakers have given lip service to cutting fraud and waste for decades but did not give a rat's heinie about actually doing anything. Musk and the DOGE team gave full credit to President Donald Trump and to his Cabinet for allowing this exploration and correction to happen.

Now that DOGE is posting all this for everyone to see, we are receiving the confirmation. Musk and the DOGE team all confirmed that some of the reasons why the waste is so prevalent and fraud is so easily executed are aged government systems that have multiple redundancies, varying computer systems from agency to agency that do not talk with each other, and the lack of accountability and safeguards within the agencies.

ELON MUSK: The ways that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other. So, if the computer systems don't talk to each other, then you can exploit that gap. And fraudsters exploit that gap and take advantage. 

DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi

 pointed out a gap in the Social Security Administration function that has been exploited by fraudsters and has received much press thanks to the hue and cry from the Democrats: the ability to change banking information over the phone.

Moghaddassi said that the Social Security Administration gets phone calls every day from people trying to get them to change their banking information. DOGE has discovered that 40 percent of those calls are from fraudsters.

MOGHADDASSI: They steal people's Social Security. They pretend to be a retiree and they convince the Social Security person to change where the money is going.

As a result of the work of DOGE and this change, grandma's benefits have a greater layer of protection from being stolen. 

Musk said: 

MUSK: What we're doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people, as a result of the work of DOGE, will receive more Social Security, not less. I want to emphasize that: as a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money.  

Musk doubled down: Let the record show that I said this, and it will be proven out to be true. Musk asked Baier to check back on this in the future.

Another manipulation of the fraud gap discovered by engineer Steve Davis

 is over $300 million in Small Business Administration loans had been given out to people under the age of 11 and over $300 million distributed to people over the age of 120. Musk discussed how this gap occurred, lamenting how fraudsters exploit the Social Security numbers of newborn babies.

MUSK: They do terrible things. They will see that a kid has been born, they will steal that kid's Social Security number, take out a loan and leave that kid with a bad credit rating. That's literally a baby. Terrible things are being done is what we're saying.

DOGE's Anthony Armstrong,

 who is working within OPM, pinpointed how this happens.

ARMSTRONG: The reason this is happening is that the two systems are not talking to each other. Right? So, you don't know at the Small Business Administration that you're giving a loan to a nine-month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross-referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. So, that very, very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. There are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another, and if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.

Musk concurred:

MUSK: When I say our job is tech support, I really mean it. We have to fix the computers. If the computers can't talk to each other, you can't get research done. If the computers can't stay online, people won't receive their Social Security. So, what we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, that are preventing research from happening, that are extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we're fixing it.

Chief DOGE engineer Steve Davis said that the number of issues with the Social Security system:

Are enormous. As an example, there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system. 

BAIER: And that's an accurate figure? 

DAVIS: Correct. Correct. This is something that has been identified as a problem, a pre-existing problem since 2008, at least from an IG report. So, there are some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this, 2008, and nothing was done about it. And so, 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that could be used only for bad intentions, there would be no way to use those for good intentions. So one of the things the DOGE team is doing is carefully, and very methodically, looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.  

Engineer Tom Krause

 is part of DOGE in the Treasury Department. He pointed to the attitude and culture within the government, which perpetuates the lack of oversight and fraud. 

Why is this allowed to happen at a financial level? Well, it's actually quite simple but alarming[...] 

It really is the taxpayer's money. One, we're changing the culture, the culture has been not a lot of caring, and not a lot of commitment to do what's right relative to financial operations. There's $500 billion of fraud every year. There's hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments and we can't pass an audit. 

The DOGE team consistently pointed out that a private company with this lack of financial controls would have gone under a long time ago.

MUSK: We're talking about elementary financial controls, that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit, it will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.

Baier asked Musk about the pushback DOGE was receiving and what his response was. Musk declared:

MUSK: Well, 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 is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it's gonna to be a fantastic future. Are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way? Absolutely. One of the things I learned at PayPal: You know who complains the loudest? What the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. Isn't that crazy?

Musk further warned:

MUSK: The reason we're doing this, is because if we don't do it, America's going to be insolvent. It's going to go bankrupt, and nobody is going to get anything.

If we don't do this, we're sunk. Unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink. That's why we're doing it.

Baier posted the entire interview on his X account. 

Editor's Note: Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.