Elon Musk on Friday defended the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cuts during a 3-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, calling the agency a “threat to the bureaucracy.”
“The reality is that our elected officials have very, very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE,” Musk said. “So, DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It’s the first threat to the bureaucracy, and normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast.”
“Many things that DOGE is fixing were identified by Government Accountability Office many years ago,” Musk added.
Civilian federal jobs are being cut by the thousands and Musk’s DOGE continues to shrink the government workforce at the behest of President Donald Trump.
That’s brought a lot of churn and uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where 20% of the country’s more than 2 million civilian — or nonmilitary — federal workers are located.
Musk during the interview criticized the U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington’s main outlet for distributing foreign assistance which is currently being dismantled by the Trump administration.
“It could be the kind of thing where you sort of fund Ebola prevention, but it turns out that actually you’re funding a lab that develops new Ebola,” Musk said. “They claim it’s Ebola prevention, but it’s actually Ebola creation.”
He also hammered Social Security.
“We found just with a basic search of the Social Security database that there were 20 million dead people marked as alive,” Musk said, telling Rogan that people were getting the funds.
Musk called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme” in danger of going bust “because there are fewer babies being born, and you have more people who are retired that live for a long time and get [Social Security] payments.”