#15
Why did you do DOGE and what did it achieve?
Interviews
9
Answers
10
X posts
3
Span
2024 to 2026
First asked Oct 19, 2024, most recently Feb 5, 2026. Excerpts below are from machine transcripts with filler words (um, uh, you know) and stutters removed; … marks a cut. They are not checked word for word, so use the link to hear the exact words, or the transcript link for the raw text. Timestamps: 4 cross-checked against YouTube captions, 6 from the archive transcript only. X has no link-to-time option, so X links open at the start.
How the answer evolved · oldest first
Oct 19, 2024 · America PAC Town Hall: Harrisburg, PA · asked by Audience Member
Q: What are your strategies and priorities to curb government spending?
Well, I've had some exposure to government spending because SpaceX has, does have a lot of government contracts. There's a lot of work for NASA and for DoD intel and whatnot. And so I've actually seen just the level of waste that happens. And if you talk to people in the government, they actually agree, yes, this is very wasteful and inefficient. And I'm like, well, why don't we do something about it? But really, in …
Oct 26, 2024 · America PAC Town Hall: Lancaster, PA · asked by Audience
Q: What would be your plan to make government more efficient?
Yeah, well, so I think the first of all, in terms of people sometimes ask, where would you start with government efficiency? And it's kind of like being in a room where the entire room is targets and so you can shoot in any direction and not miss. It's like impossible to miss because every direction is a target. So no missed possibility. Now we do have a fundamental issue, which is that the government is spending …
Feb 28, 2025 · The Joe Rogan Experience · asked by Joe Rogan
Q: What happens when you let the people control it?
I mean, it's really just like computers that are like, it's bad software and computers. Like, this is sound kind of strange, but it's like the reason I like tech support is that a lot of it's mostly not corruption, it's mostly just waste and I don't know, incompetence, I don't know.
Mar 27, 2025 · Fox News Special Report · asked by Bret Baier
Q: What are, what are the budgetary savings goals and how much do you think you've achieved so far?
Our goal is to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion. So from a nominal deficit of 2 trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to 1 trillion or looked at it in total, federal spending to drop the federal spending from 7 trillion to 6 trillion. We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud. Reduce the spending by 15% which seems really quite achievable. The government is not if not efficient and there's …
Mar 27, 2025 · Fox News Special Report · asked by Bret Baier
Q: And how do you approach that? How do you respond to that?
Well, I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts. So we want to measure twice, if not three, and cut once. And actually, that is our approach. They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. Which is not to say that 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's got …
Mar 30, 2025 · America PAC Town Hall · asked by Audience Member
Q: Do you have any information on when Doge checks would be written or sent out?
Sure. Well, I guess we need to be successful at scale. We've made a lot of progress, but there's still a tremendous amount of work to do effectively. As government spending is made more efficient and spending is reduced, the tax buyer, inflation is reduced. So one way or another, you will effectively be better off if resources in the United States are not wasted. So it's somewhat up to the Congress and maybe the …
May 20, 2025 · Qatar Economic Forum · asked by Qatar Forum Interviewer
Q: Can you see that there is a conflict of interest or a potential conflict of interest in broad terms just through that very fact?
I don't think so. Actually. There have been many advisors throughout history and in the US government and others who have had economic interests and I am simply an advisor. I don't have formal power and that's it. A President can choose to accept my advice or not. And that's how it goes. If there's a single contract that any of my companies have received that people think is somehow not was awarded improperly, it …
Oct 31, 2025 · The Joe Rogan Experience · asked by Joe Rogan
Q: This is again, something like two years plus ago. You weren't aware of it all?
No, I was aware of it. I just didn't realize how big it was. Just how much waste and forward there is in the government is truly vast. In fact, the government didn't even know, nor did they care
Nov 30, 2025 · People by WTF · asked by Nikhil Kamath
Q: What did Doge teach you, if you learned one thing?
Well, it was like a very interesting side quest because I just got to see, like, a lot of the inner workings of the government. And there's been quite a few efficiencies. I mean, some of them are very basic efficiencies, like just adding in requirements for federal payments, that any given payment must have an assigned congressional payment code and a comment field with something in it that's more than nothing. Like …
Feb 5, 2026 · Dwarkesh Podcast · asked by Dwarkesh Patel
Q: What was the point of the DOGE cuts if the economy is going to grow so much?
Well, I think like waste and food are not good things to have. I was actually pretty worried about, I guess, I mean, I think in the absence of AI and robotics, we're actually totally screwed because the national debt is piling up like crazy now. Our interest payments, the interest payments, the national debt exceed the military budget which is a trillion dollars. So over a trillion dollars. Just the interest …
In his own posts on X
@elonmusk · Feb 10, 2025
Very true! Many times, the @DOGE team has found excellent people at the working level in government who want to do the right thing, but have been prevented from doing so by prior management. Treasury is a great example. If we just empower them to make the sensible decisions they’ve always wanted to make, the reduction in fraud & waste would be massive! Moreover, we should REWARD those in government who do the right thing for the American people as a whole!
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Feb 25, 2025
This is an amazing story and exactly what @DOGE aims to do! The federal government has a MUCH larger amount of WASTE & FRAUD than a local or state government could ever have, because it can always print more money. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch and that extra money becomes inflation, which is a tax on those who can least afford it.
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Jun 22, 2026
The standard applied by DOGE was very simple and easy: Provide contact information for the recipients of aid, so that we can confirm it is not fraudulent. …
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