Despite Musk’s high profile and near-constant posting on X, major questions remain about DOGE and what it is doing.
In one of his first in-depth interviews since joining the U.S. government, Elon Musk pushed a variety of claims about waste and fraud but offered little new information or insight into the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In a wide-ranging, three-hour discussion with podcaster Joe Rogan published Friday, Musk revisited well-trodden grievances about news outlets and billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. He also touched on whether he thinks private aerospace contractors have secret propulsion technology (“I don’t think they’re hiding it from me.”), his respect for Trump’s Cabinet (“This is a revolutionary Cabinet and maybe the most revolutionary Cabinet since the first revolution.”), and a recent fringe theory that the gold in Fort Knox had been stolen.
Musk had Rogan ask Grok, the AI chatbot built by Musk’s company, xAI, whether “all the gold was in Fort Knox.”
“Are you a f—— conspiracy theorist?” Grok responded, drawing laughs from Musk and Rogan.
Musk, who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast twice before, also discussed the DOGE efforts stoking chaos at government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, Social Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Treasury Department.
The podcast appearance comes as Musk’s ascendance in the U.S. government now appears complete. Though the administration has said he is a White House advisor, President Donald Trump has said that Musk is leading the way with DOGE’s efforts to slash the federal government. At Trump’s first Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Musk had an outsized role, with Trump giving him the floor for a large chunk of it.
Despite Musk’s high profile and near-constant posting on X, major questions remain about DOGE and what it is doing, with pressure mounting from politicians and judges to be more forthcoming about its operations.
The Rogan podcast did little to answer those questions. Though Musk spoke at length about DOGE, he offered few details.
DOGE is facing nearly a dozen lawsuits regarding its access to government agencies’ and departments’ data. Musk defended the efforts, saying that “anyone from DOGE has to go through the same vetting process that those federal employees went through” to access databases.
“If for example there’s a security clearance needed, the DOGE person has to have that same security clearance, so there’s no reduction in security,” Musk said.
It’s not clear what kind of clearance or vetting DOGE staffers have.
He also said DOGE’s cuts were not mandatory.
“I want to be clear, these are cuts that DOGE recommends to the department,” Musk said. “Usually these recommendations are followed, but these are recommendations that are then confirmed by the department.”
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Musk told Rogan that the initiative began with around 40 to 100 people, but did not say whether that number has increased, and the total number of DOGE employees remains unknown. DOGE has been ridiculed by members of Congress, federal officials and others for its staffing choices, with some members being as young as 19.
Musk also continued to make claims about fraud with little evidence. He revisited Social Security, around which he recently made claims about fraud that were debunked by The Associated Press, citing a 2024 Social Security’s inspector general report.
“We found just with a basic search of the Social Security database that there were 20 million dead people marked as alive,” Musk said.
When Rogan asked if they were receiving money, Musk said yes but could not answer what percentage was receiving money. Social Security’s acting commissioner Lee Dudek, acknowledged recent reporting. “The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Musk said the fraud stemmed from people getting disability and unemployment payments because they were marked as alive. He provided no evidence for that claim, calling the fraud a “bank shot.”
In the interview, Musk also said FEMA allegedly spent $59 million in housing for migrants, a claim he also made on X. Despite Musk writing in his post that the information had been discovered by the “DOGE team,” the spending had been made public and appropriated by Congress.
The day after Musk made his X post, four FEMA officials were fired for having ties to funding hotels for migrants in New York City.
Musk also addressed the backlash he faced after making a gesture some compared to a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration celebration. He called the coverage after that episode “coordinated propaganda” from the “legacy media.” After he made the gesture, Musk posted Nazi-related puns to X.
“It was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible,” Musk said. “Now I can never point at things diagonally.”
“It’s deliberate propaganda.” Musk added. “They know it was obviously not meant in a negative way. I’d literally said, ‘my heart goes out to you.’ It was very positive. My entire speech was very positive.”
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