BREAKING NEWS: President Trump & Elon Musk in the Oval Office -Full Remarks
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And we're going to be signing a very important deal today. It's Doge. And I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found, which is shocking. Billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. And I think it's very important. And that's one of the reasons I got elected. I say we're going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick and that corrupt.

And it seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, "We don't want you to do that." Well, so maybe we have to look at the judges, 'cause that's a very serious -- I think it's a very serious violation. I'll ask Elon Musk to say a few words and, uh,

We'll take some questions. Elon, go ahead. Sure. So at a high level, if you say what is the goal of Doge or I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well, aren't we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback loop, FX, we'd have to – sorry. Sorry.

tell you gravitas can be difficult sometimes. So if there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote,

and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the President and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. So it's incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public, the public's elected representatives, the President, the House, and the Senate, decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.

This is not to say that there aren't some good, there are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, but you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people. That's the whole point of a democracy. And so, and if you looked at the founders today and said, what do you think of the way things have turned out? Well, we have this unelected democracy.

a fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has in a lot of ways currently more power than any elected representative. And this is not something that people want. And it does not match the will of the people. So it's just something we've got to fix. And they've also got to address the deficit.

a $2 trillion deficit, and if we don't do something about this deficit, the country's going bankrupt. I mean, it's really astounding that the interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the Defense Department budget.

Which is shocking, because we spend a lot of money on defense. And if that just keeps going, we're essentially going to bankrupt the country. So what I really want to say is it's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country. And it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt.

And also could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million, et cetera? Well, we do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the

in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is what happened to USAID. We're just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they're very good at investing, in which case we should take their investment advice perhaps. But just there seems to be mysteriously they get wealthy. Why? Where does it come from?

And I think the reality is that they're getting wealthier at the taxpayer expense. That's the honest truth of it. So, you know, we're looking at, say, well, just...

If you look at, say, Treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the do not pay list, that you don't actually pay it. None of those things are true currently.

So the reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building. So you can't reconcile blank checks. You've got comment fields that are also blank so you don't know why the payment was made. And then we've got this, a true leap-sword, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on a do not pay list.

And we're talking about terrorist organizations, we're talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation, can take up to a year to get on the list, and even once on the list, the list is not used. It's mind-blowing. So what we're talking here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that haven't been present. So you say, well, how could such a thing arise? That seems crazy.

When you understand that really everything is geared towards complaint minimization, then you understand the motivations. So if people receive money, they don't complain, obviously. But if people don't receive money, they do complain. And the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest. So then when you understand that, then it makes sense. Oh, that's why everything just, they approve all the payments at Treasury.

Because if you approve all the payments, you don't get complaints. But now we're saying that, no, actually, we are going to complain. If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and frugal manner, then that's not okay. Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on things that matter to the people. I mean, these things, it's just common sense. It's not...

It's not draconian or radical, I think. It's really just saying, let's look at each of these expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people? And if it is, it's proved. If it's not, we should think about it. So, you know, there's crazy things like just cursory examination of social security. And we've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't. Okay. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out.

So, you know, that's the case where like, I think they're probably dead. It's my guess. Or they should be very famous, one of the two. And then that a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there's no identifying information, well, why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it and that they receive it quickly and accurately. Also, another crazy thing. So,

One of the things is we are trying to right-size the federal bureaucracy, just make sure that this... Obviously, there needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently. So we're saying, well, okay, if people can retire with full benefits and everything, that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything.

And then we were told, this is actually a great anecdote, because we were told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We're like, well, why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. And like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.

And you look at a picture of this mine, we'll post some pictures afterwards. And this mine looks like something out of the '50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp. And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy? There's like a thousand people that work on this.

So I think if we take those people and say like, you know what, instead of working in a mine shaft and carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.

Anyway, so I think that's an example. Like at a high level, if you say like, how do we increase prosperity? Is we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there's a higher standard of living available for everyone. That's the actual goal. Everyone's very quiet.

your detractors mr musk i have to what including a lot of democrats i have detractors you do sir i don't believe it say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way what's your response to that criticism well first of all uh you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from from the public uh the public voted uh

We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We've won the House, we've won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for.

And a lot of times, you know, people, they don't get what they voted for. But in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about. Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are, in effect, policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?

Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been... I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And so...

You know, and the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very simple and basic. They're not, you know, what I mentioned brings, for example, about Treasury, just making sure that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid,

These are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that taxpayer money is spent well. So it's got nothing to do with, say, a contract with some company of mine at all.

But if there is a conflict of interest when it comes to you yourself, for instance, you've received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any sort of accountability check and balance in place that would

provide any transparency for the American people? Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say like, wait a second, hey, that seems like maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. I feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately. Including you yourself? Yes.

But transparency is what builds trust, not simply somebody asserting trust, not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency, so you can see everything that's going on. And then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not?

It's totally obvious.

Elon hasn't really mentioned are the groups of people that are getting some of these payments. They're ridiculous. And we're talking about billions of dollars that we've already found. We found fraud and abuse. I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use, but in this case, fraud and abuse. It's abusive because most of these...

Things are virtually made up or certainly money shouldn't be sent to them. And you know what I'm talking about. It's crazy. So but we're talking about tens of billions of dollars that we've already found. And now a judge is an activist judge wants to try and stop us from doing this. Why? Why would they want to do that? I campaigned on this. I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt.

And it is very corrupt. It's very, very, it's also foolish. As an example, a man has a contract for three months and the contract ends, but they keep paying him for the next 20 years, you know, because nobody ends a contract. You get a lot of that. You have a contract that's a three-month contract.

Now, normally, if you're in a small... In all fairness, it's the size of this thing is so big. But if you have a contract and you're in a regular business, you end the contract in three months, you know it's a consultant. Here's a contract for three months, but it goes on for 20 years.

And the guy doesn't say that he got money for 20 years, you know, they don't say it. They just keep getting checks month after month. And you have various things like that and even much worse than that, actually, much worse. And I guess you call that incompetence, maybe. It could be corruption. It could be a deals made on both sides, you know, where the guy gets the money, he kicks, I think there's a lot of kickback here. I see a lot of kickback here. - There's a lot of kickbacks. - Yeah, tremendous kickback. 'Cause nobody could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts. So he has to get a kickback.

So that's what I got elected for, that and borders and military, a lot of things, but this is a big part of it. And I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this horrible stuff going on. And we've already found billions of dollars, not like a little bit, billions, many billions of dollars.

And when you get down to it, it's going to be probably close to a trillion dollars. It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're going to find. That will have quite an impact on the budget. And you'll go to a judge where they handpick a judge and he has certain leanings. I'm not knocking anybody for that, but he has certain leanings and he wants us to stop looking.

How do you stop looking? I mean, we've already found it. We have a case in New York where a hotel has paid $59 million, $59 million because it's housing migrants, illegal migrants.

All illegal, I believe. And they were being paid twice the normal room rate at 100% occupancy. Unbelievable. So it's a racket. Mr. Mustamadzor, a question. If I may, sort of just going for the president's comments. At a high level, you say, well, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion? And it's really two things, competence and caring.

And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half. And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically. Might as well just camp out there. So it's not like I think I can get away with something. I'll be scrutinized nonstop. But with the support of the president, we can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion. And then with deregulation, because there's a lot of sort of

regulations that don't ultimately serve the public good. We need to free the builders of America to build. And if we do that, that means I think you get the economic growth to be maybe 3, 4%, maybe 5%. And that means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. There's no inflation in '26.

And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone's mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, their student debt, their monthly payments drop. That's a fantastic scenario for the average American. I mean, imagine they go down the grocery aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same, and their mortgage, all their debt payments dropped. How great is that for the average American?

We had no idea we were going to find this much. And it's open. It's not like complicated. It's simple stuff. It's a lot of work. We can't believe it. A lot of work, a lot of smart people involved. Very, very smart people. But you're talking about anywhere, maybe $500 billion. It's crazy the kind of numbers you're talking about. You know, normally when you're looking at something, you're looking for one out of 100.

Here, you're almost reversing it. You look for one that's good.

And you can look at the title and you say, "Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that?" And the public gets it. You know, the public gets it. You've seen the polls. The public is saying, "Why are we paying all this money? This is for years this has gone on." -Mr. President Trump -- -Yeah, go ahead. Wait. Go ahead. -Senator Rand Paul today said that doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress. Do you agree with that? Is that the plan? -I really don't know. I know there's -- We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse.

If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it'd be -- It's fine with me. I think we'll get the vote. Although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote. And how could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence?

Why would that happen? Why would even Congress want to do that? Now, Congress, if we do need a vote, I think we'd get a very easy vote because we have a track record now. We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence and corruption.

A lot of corruption. -If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling? Will you comply with that? -Well, I always abide by the courts, and then I'll have to appeal it. But then what he's done is he's slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.

You know, if a person's crooked and they get caught, other people see that and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. So, yeah, the answer is I always abide by the courts, always abide by them and will appeal. But appeals take a long time. And I would hope that a judge, if you go into a judge and you show him here's a corrupt situation, we have a check to be sent.

but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer? I would hope a judge would say, "Don't send it, give it back to the taxpayer." Yeah, if I can add to that, what we're finding is that a bunch of the fraud is not even going to Americans. So I think we can all agree that if there's going to be fraud, it should at least go to Americans.

But a bunch of the fraud rings that are operating in the United States and taking advantage of the federal government, especially in the entitlements programs, are actually foreign fraud rings that are operating in other countries and actually exporting money to other countries. We should stop that. And this is big numbers. We're talking about $100 to $200 billion a year.

serious money. Mr. Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms were sent to Gaza. But...

And after fact check this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements it wasn't sent to Hamas actually, it was sent to Mozambique which makes sense why condoms was sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say? Well first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.

So nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, any, you know, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes. So, you know, if the, I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about. And that is really an enormous number of condoms, if you think about it. But, you know, if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, okay, that's not as bad, but still, you know, why are we doing that?

Can you talk a little bit about how closely you're working with agency heads as you're directing these cuts? Do they have the -- how much input do agency heads have when you're making these decisions? Yeah, we work closely with the agency heads. And yeah, so there are sort of checks in place. So it's not just us going in and doing things willy-nilly.

punish it with agency heads and I checked with the president to make sure that this is what the president wants to happen.

We talk almost every day and I double check things to make sure. Is this something, Mr. President, you want us to do this? Then we'll do it. USAID has been one of your main targets. Are you concerned at all that some of the cuts or that shutting that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to...

to the United States? - Yeah, so that's an interesting example. So that's something where we work closely with the State Department and Secretary Rubio. And we have, for example, turned on funding for Ebola prevention and for HIV prevention. - He left that, he said. - Yes, correct. And we are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly. - Do you see it as a worthy cause, USAID?

I think that there are some worthy things, but overall, if you say what is the bang for the buck, I would say it was not very good. And there was far too much of what USAID was doing was influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day.

- Are you just off the follow up to the Pentagon contracts? If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon, and the President's directing you to look into the Department of Defense, is that a conflict of interest? - Yes, which we definitely need to do and are going to do at the President's request. - Does that present a conflict of interest for you? - No, because you'd have to look at the individual contract and say, first of all, I'm not the one, you know,

filing the contract, it's people at SpaceX or someone who will be putting for the contract. And I'd like to say if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn't by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know because every one of them was. The president said the other day that you might look at treasuries. Could you explain that a little bit? What kind of fraud, and that question goes to both of you, what kind of fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in U.S. treasuries?

I think you mean the Treasury Department as opposed to Treasury bills or -- You also referenced Treasuries on Air Force One the other night. Go ahead. Well, as I mentioned earlier, really the first order of business is to make sure we're actually collecting -- sorry for this. I thought my son might enjoy this, but he's sticking his fingers in my ears and stuff.

It's a bit hard to hear sometimes. Hey, stop that. So, no, the stuff we're doing with the Treasury Department is so basic that you can't believe it doesn't exist already. So...

So for example, like I mentioned, just making sure that when a payment goes out, it has to have a payment categorization code. It's like what type of payment is this? You can't just leave the field blank. Currently, many payments, the field is left blank. And you have to describe what's the payment for, some basic rationalization. That also is left blank. So this is why the Pentagon, when's the last time the Pentagon passed an audit? I mean, a decade ago, maybe? Ever, really? And we want to...

just in order to actually pass audits, you have to have financial information that allows you to trace the payments. So, you know, and once in a while, the Treasury has to pause payments if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization.

If a company or organization is on a do not pay list, we should not pay it. I'm sure you would agree. Like if it's quite hard to get on that payment, the do not pay list, it means that this is someone that is like dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that kind of thing. We should not pay them. But currently we do, which is crazy. We should stop that.

Many, many transactions. And by the way, hundreds, thousands of transactions like that. You know, we have a big team. And for the sake of the country, I hope that the person that's in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge

are allowed to do the right thing, namely make sure everything's honest, legitimate, and competent. But we're looking at just—when you look at USAID, that was—that's one. We're going to look at the military. We're going to look at education. They're much bigger areas. But the USAID is really corrupt. I'll tell you, it's corrupt. It's incompetent, and it's really corrupt.

And I can't imagine a judge saying, "Well, it may be corrupt, but you don't have the right." You got elected to look over the country and to, as we say, make America great again, but you don't have the right to go and look and see whether or not things are right that they're paying or that things are honest that they're paying. And nobody can even believe this. Other people, law professors, they've been saying,

How can you take that person's right away? You're supposed to be running the country, but we're not allowed to look at who they're paying it to and what they're paying. We have massive amounts of fraud that we caught. I think we probably caught way over...

a lot of billions of dollars already in, what, two weeks? -Yes. -And it's gonna go to numbers that you're not gonna believe. And much -- As I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. And the only way we're gonna catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is gonna say you're not allowed to look for it,

That's pretty sad for our country. I don't understand how it could even work. The Press: On the buyout program, can you personally guarantee that -- The President: Which one? The Press: The buyout program, the offer to federal workers -- can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid through September? The President: Well, they'll get their money, but they're getting a good deal. They're getting a big buyout. And what we're trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people. We have office space. It's occupied by 4 percent. Nobody's showing up to work because they were told not to.

And then Biden gave them a five-year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them, gave them a five-year pass that for five years, you don't have to show up to work. And let me tell you, this is largely, much of this stuff is because of Biden. It's his fault. He allowed this country what he did on our border. What he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with...

all of these contracts that have come out. It's a very sad day when we look at it. I can't even believe it, but many contracts just extend and they just keep extending and there was nobody there to correct it. And that cannot be, I can't imagine that could be held up by the court. Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn't have the right to go over their books and make sure everything's honest.

I mean, how can you have a country -- you can't have anything that way. You can't have a business that way. You can't have a country that way. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.