There is a lot of anxiety, misconceptions and distortions about Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency.  The above interview with members of the team and their leader Elon Musk gives everyone an inside view of what the work is, who is doing it and why, and what is at stake for citizens and taxpayers.  For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions with my added images.  BB is Bret Baier of Fox News and EM is Elon Musk.  Baier introduces other participants by name and background.

BB: Thanks for having us and doing this I know there’s a lot of interest in Doge. Let me start with you Elon: What are what are the budgetary savings goals and and how much do you think you’ve achieved so far?

EM: Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. So from a nominal deficit of 2 trillion, it is to cut the deficit in half to 1 trillion. Or looking at it in total federal spending, to drop the federal spending from 7 trillion to Six Trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste. And to reduce the spending by 15%, which seems really quite achievable.

The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of of the critical government services, and in fact making them better.

BB: I’m going talk to all the guys here about the specifics. But for you what’s the most astonishing thing you found out in this process?

EM: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing, it’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more just casually. For example,  there was a simple survey that was literally a 10 questions survey, that you could do with Survey Monkey costing about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. A billion dollars for a simple online survey with questions like: Do you like the national park? And then there appears to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go for nothing.

BB: You technically are a special government employee and you’re supposed to be 130 days. Are you going to continue past that or what do you think you’re going to do?

EM: Well I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.

BB: So in that time frame and and the process is a report at some point?

EM: Not really a report we are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes our goal is to reduce the the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day 7 days a week, and so far we are succeeding.

BB: I’m going to talk of the specifics but there there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. Obviously lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. And they characterize the approach as: Fire, Ready and then Aim. And how do you approach that, how do you respond to that?

EM: Well I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts, so we want to measure twice if not thrice and cut once. That actually is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. It’s not say that we make we don’t make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball has got to bat a thousand. That’s impossible, so when we do make mistakes we correct them quickly and we we move on.

BB: Some people say this shouldn’t take a rocket scientist, but Steve Davis you are a rocket scientist. Used to be and now essentially you’re the Chief Operating Officer of Doge day-to-day operations, fair to say. So how did you end up here, what’s the biggest challenge you see?

SD: The reason I’m here, which is probably the same for many, is that I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that to have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing, and therefore keeping the country from going bankrupt is a good thing. So all of us are willing to kind of put our lives on hold in order to do this. I think the thing that’s special right now is we actually believe there’s a chance to succeed. There’s an Administration that’s supportive and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome. Given the inspiring Mission and given the non-zero chance of success it it was worth doing.

EM: Let me reemphasize that point that the success of Doge is only possible with President Trump and with the outstanding cabinet that he selected. It would be impossible without the support of the president and the cabinet.

BB: But you’re finding the money, I mean it’s big numbers right?

SD: Yeah like Elon said the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars. So for example the $830 million which was the online survey. That’s an enormous amount of money that wouldn’t have been found if the Doge team wasn’t working with in that case the Department of Interior. But then taking it one step further Doge then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. It would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments. They’re not yet in real time, they’re close but they’ll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.

BB: But the process still involves Congress right, at some level?

EM: We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. The law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully. It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress. And we’ve seen actually great support at least from the Republican side of the house and occasionally some Democrats too.

You know it’s nice to see people cross the aisle once in a while. But usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics. They’ll say what we’re doing is somehow unconstitutional or illegal or whatever. We’re saying, well which line of the cost savings do you disagree with and they can’t point to any. And we list them all on on doge.gov and and the Doge handle on X. And you’ll see just outrageous things, one outrageous thing after another.

BB: Joe Gebbia, besides Elon you’re one of several billionaires, being co-founder of Airbnb, and you wanted to help out.

JG: I bumped into Anthony Elon probably back in February and they told me something about a mine that dealt with retirement and they said they needed somebody to help out to fix retirement in the government. I loved the challenge so I jumped on board. And it turns out there is actually a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government.

Now picture this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed in the last 70 years. As we dug into it we found retirement cases that had so much paper they had to fit it on a shipping pallet. So the process takes many months and we’re going to make it just some days.

So this will be an online digital process that will take just a few days at most. And I really think you know it’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight. We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.

BB: Because right now it’s by hand?

EM: Yes the the retirement process is all by paper literally with people carrying paper and manilla envelopes into this gigantic mine. So they can’t retire more than a certain number every month about 8,000 a month. That’s how we discovered it. We were saying, well let’s encourage voluntary retirement; they said, well the most they could do is 8,000 a month. And even in normal circumstances it can take 6 to 9 months just to just to have your retirement paperwork processed, and they often get the calculations wrong.

So we’re wondering, why would it take so long to retire? Ad they say, well because of the mine. “What do you mean a mine, what’s a mine got to do with retiring?” And that’s where we discovered that all the retirement stuff is done still done by paper in a process that looks identical to what occurred in the 1950s. If you compare a snapshot of the mine when it first started in the 50s to today, it looks the same.

BB: It’s amazing, so how long do you think it’ll take to turn over?

JG:  We’re working as fast as we can. Probably next couple months we’ll have this this overhauled, and you know I really think again, why are we subjecting our federal workers to processes that they actually have to go through a training just to retire from the government. There’s a whole training program that people have to go through in order to retire, I think we can do better for them.

BB: Arum Moghaddassi, Doge engineer. You go into these places, one of the more than a dozen engineers, the first people to go into the agencies and view the computer data sets. Tell me what you’re finding, and for people who don’t understand how that process works, explain it for them.

AM: I’ll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically the state of government computers. By some estimates, government costs about hundred billion dollars and it’s funding systems are over 50 years old. In the case of something like Social Security or the IRS the really critical systems are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain and the efforts to improve them are often very delayed. So I thought, I’m a software engineer, maybe that could make a difference here, and that’s really what inspired me at a high level.

BB: There’s a lot of mystery about social security and a lot of words about it. Here’s what Democrats have been saying about: it’s absurd that Elon Musk is trying to eliminate billions of dollars from Social Security. Elon Musk and president Trump have set their sights on cutting Social Security their goal is clear: destroy Social Security from within. You’re in the building, I mean you’re in the computers. What’s happening there, what are you doing?

AM: Yeah it doesn’t line up with my experience on the ground. And I’ll say the two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits, protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis. And also make the experience better.  I’ll give you one example which is at Social Security. One of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters;  40%, that’s right, almost half.

EM: Yes and they steal from people their Social Security. What happens is they they call in, they claim to be a retiree, then they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money is flowing. It actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day, every day. And then somebody doesn’t receive their social security, and it’s because of of all the the fraud loopholes in the Social Security System.

BB: How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not going to affect their benefit benefits?

EM: No. In fact what 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. Let the record show that I said this and it will be proven out to be true.

BB: Let’s check back on this in the future. So from Washington post: The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled veterans from logging into their online accounts. People freaked out. Is that going to change?

EM: Yes we’re going to make sure that the website stays online.

BB: But I mean is it a result of going in there, something you’re doing?

SD: No no. The amount 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. That’s an accurate figure. This has been something that’s been identified as a problem. Again it’s a pre-existing problem since 2008 at least from an IG report. So there were some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this in 2008.

And nothing was done, so that 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around. That can be used only for bad intentions, there’d be no way to use those for good intentions. One of the things the Doge team is doing is carefully and and very methodically looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.

BB: Brad Smith working at HHS and obviously another element is Medicare and Medicaid. What are you finding?

Brad: Well I’d say there’s a couple things we’re really committed to in our work at HHS. Number one is making sure we continue to have the best biomed research in the world, and number two is making sure what president Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s a lot of opportunity.

If I take NIH as an example today, if you’re an NIH researcher and you get a $100 Grant at your University today you get to spend 60 of that and your University spends 40 of that. The policy we’re proposing is that you get to spend 85 of that and your University spends 15. So that’s more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures.

Another example at NIH is today they have 27 different centers that got created over time by Congress. And they’re typically by disease state or body system. There’s 700 different IT systems today at NIH, 700 different IT software systems. They can’t speak to each other so they don’t talk and they have 27 different CIOs. When you think about making great medical discoveries you have to connect the data. But with 27 Chief Information officers and most people are non-technical.  So there’s a lot of opportunity which will make science better not worse.

EM: When I say that our job is tech support I really mean it. Yeah 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 we have here a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, that are preventing people from accessing needed research resources. Computer systems that are extremely vulnerable to fraud. And we’re fixing it.

BB: Does that include AI, does that include kind of changing the system overall? I guess that’s what people are afraid of:  they don’t know what this is all looking like and is it going to affect me in the long term.

EM: It’s going to affect people very positively. The changes that we’re doing here will ensure the solvency of the government of the United States of America. We’re trying to ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the the country is operating in a in a healthy and competent way.

BB: Anthony Armstrong, Doge office of personnel management, Morgan Stanley Banker M&A guy, you know money and this is a lot of money sloshing around.

AA: There’s a lot of money sloshing around; there’s a lot of money sloshing out the door. If you look at the federal government and the way the workforce works, it’s really a one-way ratchet over decades. It’s only going up, you never take anything away. So that leaves you with duplicative functions, it leaves you with overstaffing and it leaves you with functions in the wrong places.

So a couple of examples of duplicative function. Brad mentioned 27 CIOs, if you had kept going with Brad he probably he would talk about the Communications office. I think you’ve got 40 distinct Communications offices in in HHS. Yeah 40 and that’s not unusual by by the way. And multiple offices like that are not making anyone healthy. This is not about the employees. There’s many many hardworking, well-meaning people who took these jobs. The jobs were out there, they applied for them, they took them and they’re doing what’s there. It’s just that they’re duplicating the efforts of 40 offices. So you’ve got that and you’ve got overstaffing.

A good example of overstaffing would be the IRS having 1,400 people who are dedicated to provisioning laptops and and cell phones. If you join the IRS you get a laptop and a cell phone you’re provisioned. If each of those IRS officers or employees provisioned two employees per day you could provision the entire IRS in a little more than a month. So 12 times a year. It makes no sense why you have would 1400 people whose only job it is to give out a laptop and a phone, when the whole IRS could be handled once a month.

So that doesn’t that doesn’t make any sense and president Trump’s been very clear: scalpel not hatchet. And that’s the way it’s it’s getting done, and once those decisions are made, there’s a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, compassionate and treating everyone with dignity and respect. If you look at how people have started to leave the government it is largely through voluntary means. There’s voluntary early retirement, there’s voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation the 8-month severance program. So there’s a very heavy bias towards programs that are long-dated that are generous that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector.

You’ve heard a lot of news about RIFs, about people getting fired at at this moment in time. Less than 0.15 of the federal Workforce has actually been given a RIF notice, so mostly they’ve selected if they’re leaving. Basically almost no one’s gotten fired is what we’re saying.

BB: Tom Krause, working at Treasury you are having access to the payment system that oversees all the outgoing payments. Essentially those payments were going places we didn’t know where they were going right?

TK: Unfortunately that’s the case. You know as an ex CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is applying public company standards to the federal government. And it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today. There actually is really only one bank account that’s used to disperse all monies that go out of the federal government. One bank account that is a big, big one. A couple weeks ago it had $800 billion, but it’s the treasury general account.

When you hear some of my colleagues here talking about fraud, you have to ask: well why is this allowed to happen. At a financial level well it’s actually quite simple but alarming. The treasury up until now and thanks to president Trump we’re fixing this in fact there’s an executive order that he just signed which is protecting America’s bank account because it really is the taxpayers money.

You know we’re changing the culture because the culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right. Relative to financial operations there’s $500 billion dollars of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billion dollars of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit. The Consolidated financial report is produced by Treasury and we cannot pass it on, we have material weaknesses. That means if I were a public company CFO I would effectively be removed if I couldn’t file financial statements. I couldn’t issue securities of course since we can’t pass an audit.

EM: Right the federal government cannot pass an Audit. It’s impossible in fact. In order to pass an audit you need the information necessary to pass an audit. You need to have the payment codes, you need to have the payment explanation and you need to have a person you can contact to understand why that payment was made. None of those things were mandatory, yeah until just recently. In just the last few weeks we’re serving 580 plus agencies, and up until very recently they effectively could say make the payment and treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification

And so we’re doing what any household would do. But imagine you’re a household with a bank account and everyone has the ATM card connected to that account, everyone has a checkbook on that account. It’s not just your children, not just your parents; it’s your in-laws it’s your extended family, and they all can go to the account and disperse funds no questions asked. No justification, no verification.

BB: Tyler Hassen, Interior Department, you’re a former Oil Company CEO. You’re reviewing contracts before they’re approved for funding, what are you finding?

TH: Well Elon and Steve kind of stole my thunder, but I actually found that customer service survey contract. I actually have an example of one right here, I was able to do this in high school, I found it that bad. I found it on the weekends because under the Biden Administration there was no departmental oversight within the Department of Interior whatsoever, none. We are now reviewing every single contract, every single Grant, and when things come to my attention that don’t make sense I’m bringing then to secretary Burgum. He has been fantastic, he’s a businessman and very supportive of Doge. It’s been wonderful to work with him.

BB: The battle has decades of buildup between government and business, which you guys are. Is that like a train hitting each other, I mean it it seems like it’s pretty disruptive.

EM: Well this is a revolution and it might be the 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 and it’s going to be a fantastic future. Are we going to get a lot of complaints along the way, absolutely. You know one of the things I learned at PayPal was this: who complains the loudest and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation, the fraudsters, that’s a tell. NGOs that are crazy like the the $2 billion the Stacy AB NGO that basically didn’t exist and suddenly gets $2 billion awarded from the federal government. Why? And there are many cases like that.

BB: I think that most people Common Sense wise would say the Fraud’s got to end. They’re concerned about the 94-year-old grandmother who misses a check or somehow doesn’t get what she’s supposed to get.

EM: Right and what we’re trying to say is actually that the 94-year-old grandmother as a result of Doge’s work is going to get her check. She’s not going to be robbed by fraud like she’s getting robbed today. And the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those Social Security checks. And that Medicare continues to work without which we’re all doomed. The reason we’re doing this is because unless we do it America’s going to go insolvent, we’re going to go bankrupt and nobody’s going to get anything.

BB: Why are you guys all doing it? I mean you can pipe up but it you don’t have to be here, right. I mean you don’t you don’t have to be doing this.

TK: I am blessed with four children, my wife and I, but we have a real fiscal crisis and and this is not sustainable. And what’s worse, for my children and everyone else’s children, we are burdening them with that debt and it’s only going to grow.

BB: There’s not a lot of hierarchy here. You guys are kind of all approaching it in different silos but with the same kind of goal right. This is really Silicon Valley private sector colliding with government.

SD: Yeah exactly we’re headed in a bad path but that the chance of success exists. And just in my head right now is a fairly mundane issue that is very illustrative, namely credit cards. There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So all the teams have worked on this with the agencies and said: Do you need all of these credit cards; are they being used; can you tell us physically where they are.

BB: I hope they’re getting frequent flyer points.

SD: Actually on a different note the rewards program the federal government has is actually not very good but that’s a whole other negotiation story. But so far the teams have worked together and they’ve reduced it from 4.6 million to to 4.3 million so we’re taking it easy. But clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people.

BB: Yeah Joe middle level employees, are they seeing a benefit to being empowered by taking out bureaucracy?

JG: I mean absolutely I mean I think what you’re seeing is taking the best of Silicon Valley in the business world and bringing it into the government. We’re bringing the best practices and the best methodologies and people are inspired, especially on the retirement process which I can speak to. They’ve been trying to modernize and get off of paper since early 2000s not very successfully. Every attempt has gone over budget and been cancelled because it was not successful.

And so I showed up and I feel like I’m here because it’s an interesting problem, we can use design to solve it and good engineering, and really create a better experience for everybody.

EM: 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, and 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.

One way that the government is defrauded is because the computer systems don’t talk to each other. The fraud comes when someone exploits that Gap to take advantage. For example there were over $300 million of small business administration loans that have been given out to people under the age of 11. Well actually to add up, it’s 300 million under the age of 11, and over 300 million to over the age of 120. Definitely small business loans correct. Yet the oldest American is 114 years old. So it’s safe to say if their age is 115 or above they’re fake or they should be in the book of World Records. And we should not be giving out um loans to babies, yet the youngest recipient of a small business administration loan is a 9-month year old, which is a very precocious baby.

Obviously it was just fraudulent. They are doing terrible things. They actually will see that a kid’s been born, they will steal that kid’s social security number and then take out a loan and and leave that kid with a with a bad credit rating. Terrible Things are being done is what we’re saying and the reason this is happening is because the the two systems are not talking to each other.

AA: So you don’t know at the small business administration that you’re giving a loan to a 9-month-old, which happened in one case, because you’re not cross referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. That very very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. And there are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another. Just solving that simple problem would solve a huge amount of fraud.

EM: One of the the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is marked as live. Since that social security number is marked as live in Social Security, they then can get disability and unemployment insurance benefits for a dead person because the databases don’t talk to each other. So the person is falsely marked alive in Social Security, so the fraudster can get benefits from a dead person. This is happening all the time at scale.

BB: We didn’t talk about any plans to approach cuts at the Pentagon, you’re in there.

EM: You know the Pentagon has not passed an audit in a very long time. Crazy as it sounds they will lose 20 $30 billion a year and they literally don’t know where it went. Senator Collins was telling me about how she gave the Navy $112 billion for extra submarines and got zero extra submarines. When she held a hearing and asked where did the 112 billion go, they didn’t know.

BB: Are you surprised at some of the legal efforts and some of the judges that have weighed in. There’s about eight or 10 now of these cases that are at least temporary holds and they’re being challenged by the DOJ. Are you surprised by that push back?

EM: Well the DC circuit is notorious for having a a very far-left bias and when you look at the people close to some of these judges, people who are working at these NGOS, they’re the ones getting this money. Does that seem like a system that lacks corruption?

BB: It sounds like corruption to me. Last thing do you guys all see this as a patriotic duty? Is that really what this is about?

TH: It’s essential I do 100%. I was running five businesses in Houston and I left that. I left great people to do this. And my wonderful wife said go for it and here I am. I feel like this is me giving back to the country. 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.

BB: Well gentlemen I really appreciate the time today and hopefully it took some of the myth and mystery out of Doge and what’s happening behind the scenes. Thank you. We asked on X your platform for some for some questions and here is uh C. Sperling: Are they happy with the speed at which they’re making changes? Are there any changes they would like to make but haven’t yet?

EM: Well in the context of the government we’re moving like lightning. In the context of what I’m used to moving it’s slower than I’d like. So what seems like incredibly fast action by government standards is slower than I’d like, to be totally Frank. But what we are all making solid progress on a very sort of thorny problem, a tough problem really. It’s kind of like painful hard work to reconcile all of the government databases to eliminate the waste and fraud. These databases don’t talk to each other and that’s really the biggest vulnerability for fraud. Painful as it is, it has to be done and will greatly improve the efficiency of the government systems.