Elon Musk is Washington's new consultant in chief.
He's been tasked with making the government leaner.
And this week, his Department of Government Efficiency made headlines by gaining access to the Treasury Department's payment system, as well as other sensitive government data.
This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in U .S.
politics. I'm Mark Filippino, and this week we're asking, how far can Elon Musk take his quest to downsize the government?
Here with me to discuss is Joe Miller.
He covers the intersection of business and government for us in Washington.
Hi, Joe. Hi, Mark. And we've also got Alex Rogers, the FT's business and politics correspondent, also in Washington.
Hi, Alex. Hey, Mark.
All right, so let's start with some basics.
Elon Musk is officially in Washington as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, like the cryptocurrency, yes.
Joe, can you tell me what is Doge and where did it come from?
To the best of my ability, yes, Mark.
Well, Doge is a vehicle that was announced in November for Elon Musk to fulfill his ambition of drastically slashing government spending by, He initially floated roughly $2 trillion a year.
It's unclear, or it was unclear, what precisely the format of it would be, despite the fact that it's got department in its name.
But it does seem to be a branch of the executive office of the White House, which has a bunch of tech CEOs and founders and a load of young coders embedded in it who are going around key government agencies and essentially auditing them for so -called waste and frivolous spending and rapidly shutting
down various activities and attempting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants.
Yeah, Alex, expand on that a little bit for me.
What has exactly Doge been up to in its almost three -week existence?
Yeah, so Doge has installed itself at the U .S.
Treasury, the state and health departments, the Federal Aviation Administration, a host of smaller agencies.
And they're starting to find areas to cut.
And so the first victim, if you will, was the entire $40 billion agency, USAID, the Agency of International Development, which has effectively been shuttered.
He's going after health and human services.
is there hasn't been a heads up on what they're going after next.
But, you know, by Elon Musk's Twitter feed, it looks like weapon systems at DoD could be something that they focus on.
So more recently, Doge caused an uproar when it got access to treasury payments data.
Joe, what do we know and why are people so upset about that?
Well, this is perhaps the most sensitive system within the US government.
It is more or less the vehicle, the checkbook, if you will, through which government funds are dispersed.
And it seems that Doge targeted this early on because by looking at things as they go out of the door, you can sort of go down line by line and item by item and see whether you agree with it or whether you think this is wasteful spending.
The problem is that this is, you know, as I mentioned, a very sensitive system.
And all of a sudden, two people who were not even named until earlier this week, emissaries from Doge, reportedly had access to it.
And Elon Musk was going on X and posting that he was rapidly shutting down illegal payments.
Sorry, just let me jump in there for a second.
Did these guys get the official clearance to be there?
Because my understanding is that these folks didn't necessarily go through the background checks that you would normally need, right, Alex?
Yeah, I talked to Don Hammond, who used to run the federal payment system.
And what he told me is that improper access could affect payment integrity and or sensitive data.
And so when we're thinking about the world's richest man taking on the world's largest bureaucracy, the question is really, who do you trust?
And half the country probably loves that Elon Musk is doing what Washington has been unable to do for decades, which is to go after, you know, so -called waste, fraud, and abuse.
But the issue here is how it's being done.
So it sounds like there's some murky territory here.
Is anything about Doge inherently illegal?
Well, there have been various lawsuits filed suggesting exactly that and suggesting that the activities thus far by Doge Miseries have, for example, violated privacy laws and that Doge does not have the authority needed to wield what are essentially executive powers, what you would expect to be wielded
by, you know, Senate approved nominees to various agencies.
One thing that certainly does seem to be controversial or borderline illegal was the attempted impounding of funds that had already been dispersed and the attempt to stop those by the executive.
Now that, a couple of judges have already stopped that and the White House was forced to kind of rescind its order and so there are some curbs, But in terms of, you know, what Doge is doing, the problem is that it's happening so fast and we're only really hearing about Doge's activities through leaks
and media reports that it's very hard for campaign groups, even for Congress and for the courts to keep up.
There's also conflicting messages, right?
Elon on Twitter, on the social platform that he owns, saying that they are going after discretionary spending.
They are going after government leases.
But then you talk to the Treasury Department, and they're saying that those representatives only have access to review the payment system, which then doesn't seem to be exactly true if you're hearing what Elon is tweeting about all day, which is why the Treasury Department had to write a letter to clarify
some of that this week.
So what has the reaction been from Congress?
Is there a sense that they're just going to let this slide?
Because this is kind of their ballgame here, right?
Yeah, I went to the Trump Doral where the House Republicans were having their retreat to talk about the year ahead.
And I would ask members on the budget committee or financial services.
And nobody really seemed willing to say Congress has the power of the purse here.
Everybody seemed like, oh, I mean, this makes sense.
You know, these cuts agree with my priorities.
Some would occasionally say, you know, these are recommendations.
So I think there was this mix when you talk to members of Congress where they're praising Elon publicly.
They don't want to have him on their bad side.
They agree with, in general, the overarching priorities of trying to cut government spending.
But I do think that once you start hitting some of these other programs, in the US especially, then we're going to see a bigger fight.
I think what's also interesting is that Elon Musk has a far more effective propaganda machine than members of Congress could ever dream of having.
And you've seen as he's going through these various departments, especially when it's come to USAID, that he has simultaneously been flooding the zone with examples of what he sees as egregious spending, and people even who are loyalists to USAID into these particular departments will agree that there
are some areas where there's been frivolous spending, etc.
But Musk has been incredibly effective at posting this stuff and saying, isn't this ridiculous?
And to most normal people, this could be a very effective message.
And he says, why should your tax dollars be paying for this research?
One of his favorite examples is a shrimp on a treadmill, which is an extract from a piece of research, which I won't go into.
But the point being, these things sound ridiculous when they're taken out of context.
And it's very hard for members of Congress to at least, you know, thus far to stand up and say, no, no, no, no, we support that particular budget item, because Musk is so effective at ridiculing it.
So guys, last question here.
It sounds like Doge kind of has free reign unless somebody steps in.
Is there anything that can kind of get in its way right now?
Well, there's one thing for certain, and that is Donald Trump.
And we've seen this week that after Musk dominated the headlines for days in a row, something we know that Trump is not particularly fond of, Trump told reporters that there are limits to Musk's power and said that he's running things by the White House, but he said Elon can't do and won't do anything
without our approval.
He also hinted that the White House had already vetoed some of the more radical suggestions that Doge has floated.
And then there's also the others within the Trump orbit who have competing priorities.
Trump himself has vowed not to touch Social Security and Medicaid.
And, you know, there are many within his orbit who would also stand in the way of those being slashed.
And of course, there are plenty of China hawks who want more money at the Department of Defense rather than less.
And so those are perhaps going to be the more effective curbs on Musk's power.
All right, I want to thank our guest, Joe Miller.
He's the FT's Washington correspondent.
Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Mark.
And Alex Rogers, he's our U .S.
and business correspondent.
Thanks, Alex. Yeah, thanks for having me.
This was Swamp Notes, the U .S.
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Thanks for everything, Ethan.
I'm your host, Mark Filipino.
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