President Donald Trump suggested in remarks broadcast Sunday that Elon Musk, who is overseeing a purging of US government jobs, will assist in uncovering “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” in federal agencies.
In a Fox News interview scheduled to air before the Super Bowl football championship, Trump stated that the American people “want me to find” waste and that Musk, the world’s richest man and the head of the president’s cost-cutting efforts, has been “a great help” in identifying excessive spending.
“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse. And, you know, the people elected me on that,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, according to excerpts.
During his three weeks in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders targeted at reducing federal expenditure. He has recruited SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to lead his federal cost-cutting initiatives through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
However, while the administration has identified some federal projects that Trump believes should be terminated or reduced, no evidence of widespread unlawful fraud has been revealed.
Musk, a major Trump donor and ally, has already taken unprecedented moves to close the US Agency for International Development, laying off hundreds of staff. Critics have also expressed concern about the DOGE reform team’s access to millions of Americans’ personal and financial information via the US Treasury.
On Friday, a federal judge temporarily halted the administration’s plan to put 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave.
A day later, another US judge issued an emergency order blocking DOGE from accessing Treasury Department payment systems that contain Americans’ sensitive data.
“Then I’m going to go to the military,” Trump said, reiterating his call for a review of spending at the Pentagon, whose budget totals some $850 billion.
In an interview, Trump stated that he will order Musk to focus on the Department of Education, a frequent target of Republican ire.
Speaking on whether he trusts Musk to fairly root out wasteful spending, Trump appeared to assert that the wealthy entrepreneur and his businesses are not benefiting financially through Musk’s work with DOGE.
“He’s not gaining anything,” Trump said.
Democrats have lined up to criticise Trump’s various efforts, including Senator Chris Murphy, who on Sunday warned of an “assault on the Constitution” and said Trump was ushering in a “billionaire takeover of government.”
“The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends and he can punish his political enemies. That is the evisceration of democracy,” Murphy told ABC News talk show “This Week.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, the senior Republican in Congress, has consistently dismissed worries that Trump is overstepping his authority or moving too swiftly to reorganise the federal government, including agencies such as USAID.
“I’m not uncomfortable with the pace of this,” Johnson told “Fox News Sunday.”
The speaker, who will watch the Super Bowl with Trump in a New Orleans stadium suite, portrayed Musk as “an outside auditor” whose team is exposing “incredible abuses of the public fisc,” which refers to the entire amount of money that a government must spend.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, declined to comment Sunday on whether he thought it was a conflict of interest for Musk, whose companies have government military contracts, to monitor Pentagon cost-cutting efforts.
“Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long, and deliver too little to the soldiers,” Waltz told NBC of Pentagon expenses.
“We do need great minds. We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process,” he said, adding that “all of the appropriate firewalls will be in place.”
