In an interview on “The Katie Miller Pod,” Elon Musk said DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, was a “somewhat successful” venture, but he wouldn’t do it again.
ELON MUSK: Well, I guess I couldn’t believe I was there, for the most part. It’s like, it all seemed extremely surreal at the time. You know, Doge was a made-up name that had been made up, I don’t know, two or three months before.
And based on internet suggestions. And I was going to call it the Government Efficiency Commission. And then someone on the internet said, no, it should be the Department of Government Efficiency, DOG. I’m like, that sounds great. So we just kind of made up a department.
MILLER: Do you think you were successful?
MUSK: We’re a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful. I mean, we stopped a lot of funding for — that really just made no sense. That was just entirely wasteful. Where, like, for example, there was like, probably 100, maybe 200 billion dollars worth of zombie payments per year.
Which simply by enforcing that there be a payment code and an explanation for the payment, that the payment would not go out. So we’ve made that change to the main treasury computer and a bunch of other computers. It’s like, it seems like insanely obvious.
But there are just, call it two or three percent of government payments that go out that really should not be going out. And it’s actually quite hard to stop. So it’s a pretty rare individual that would ask the government to stop sending them money.
MILLER: Would you ever do DOGE again?
MUSK: Do you mean, would I repeat history or would I?
MILLER: Two ways to think about it. One is, if you could go back and start from scratch, like it’s January 20th all again, would you go back and do it differently? And knowing what you know now, do you think there’s ever a place to restart? You, not saying others in your stead, you go back and restart doing DOGE.
MUSK: I mean, no, I don’t think so. Would I do it? I think I probably, I don’t know.
MILLER: Would you do DOGE again knowing what you know now?
MUSK: I mean, the thing is, I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built, you know, work to my companies essentially. So, and the cars, they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.
MILLER: You gave up a lot to do Doge.
MUSK: Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you stop money going for political corruption, they will lash out big time. So, they really want the money to keep flowing. So, if you stop it from flowing, there’s like a very strong reaction to stopping the money flowing.
MILLER: After you were in DC for a while, did you become disillusioned with how it operates?
MUSK: Well, I wouldn’t say I was super illusioned to begin with. I mean, I guess it’s just like, you really want the least amount done by government possible. The least amount. I guess maybe the biggest thing is that, I guess the biggest single thing is that there are massive transfer payments going to illegal immigrants, like massive. Essentially, we’re paying people to come here from somewhere else in vast numbers, including flying them in. So, like, it’s not like you need a border wall if you’re flying them in. Then fast tracking them to citizenship and making them beholden to government payments. And voting hard left. That’s essentially, it’s like voter importation.
If you create a gigantic money magnet to, you say, if anyone comes here from anywhere else, we’re going to pay you tons of money, give you lots of free stuff. Come to America and get paid to do so. Like, you’re going to get a lot of people taking up on that offer.
When people say, like, this is fake. I’m like, actually, well, let’s look at, you know, Ilhan Omar, who was literally, was voted into power, voted into Congress by, you know, a large group of people from Somalia who are in Minnesota, which is really far from Somalia. Or Mamdani, who was voted to be mayor, by a majority of people who are not born in America.
That’s my understanding, at least. So, and then California, same big time situation. So, I don’t know, we’re just going to turn into a, you know, communist hellhole, basically.
