SpaceX and Tesla boss Musk is presiding over a purge of US government jobs that critics call an ‘evisceration of democracy’.
US President Donald Trump has said he expects his ally Elon Musk to find billions of dollars of fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, after he was tasked with leading an audit to slash the size of the US federal workforce.
“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said of the largest federal department in an interview with Fox News, an excerpt of which was aired on Sunday morning.
“And, you know, the people elected me on that.”
The Pentagon’s budget is approaching $1 trillion per year. In December, then-President Joe Biden signed a bill authorising $895bn in defence spending for the fiscal year ending on September 30.
Right-wing billionaire and SpaceX and Tesla boss Musk, who the White House appointed to head the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will have access to confidential information in computer systems at various government agencies in order to fulfil the set task.
Leaders from across the political spectrum have long criticised waste and inefficiency at the Pentagon, but critics say these efforts risk exposing classified information and gutting entire agencies without congressional approval.
Musk’s companies also hold major contracts with the Pentagon, which has raised significant conflict-of-interest concerns. A US judge on Saturday issued an emergency order blocking DOGE from accessing Treasury Department payment systems that contain Americans’ sensitive data.
Despite the concerns, Trump seemed to double down on the idea, saying he was going to ask Musk “very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. … Then I’m going to go, go to the military”.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz suggested in a separate interview on Sunday that the Pentagon’s shipbuilding processes could be an area of particular interest.
“Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process,” Waltz said in an interview with NBC News.
Over his three weeks in office, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at slashing federal spending – including halting funds to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – but evidence of widespread fraud has not been presented.
On Saturday, the Trump administration ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down an agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal.
Democrats have slammed Trump’s efforts. Senator Chris Murphy 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, he can punish his political enemies,” Murphy told ABC News. “That is the evisceration of democracy.”
