Elon Musk on X
CV NEWS FEED // Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk and his 4-year-old son X Æ A-Xii joined President Donald Trump Tuesday for a press conference in the Oval Office.
Musk told reporters that “the goal of DOGE” and a “significant part” of Trump’s second presidency “is to restore democracy.”
“If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government and you have rule of the bureaucrat … what meaning does democracy actually have?” the billionaire businessman asked.
“If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House,” he added, “then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”
Musk added that it is important to “fix that feedback loop” so that the “public’s elected representatives … decide what happens as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy.”
“We have this unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government,” he said later during his Oval Office remarks.
Critics of the increased power that has been granted to the administrative state over the past several decades have long made this argument. These critics have further argued that executive branch administrative agencies effectively perform federal lawmaking duties that are exclusively reserved to Congress per the Constitution.
“You can’t have an autonomous federal bureaucracy,” Musk said. “You have to have one that is responsive to the people. That’s the whole point of a democracy.”
“We also got to address the deficit,” he continued. “We’ve got a two-trillion-dollar deficit, and if we don’t do something about this deficit, the country’s going bankrupt. It’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It’s essential.”
Also during the conference, Trump asked Musk to share some of DOGE’s findings about federal workers who appeared to make significantly more money than could be accounted for by their taxpayer-funded salaries.
Trump that day had signed an executive order “that requires federal agencies to work with the U.S. DOGE Service to cut their existing workforce and limit future hiring,” The Washington Post reported.
In response to Trump’s question Musk said, “There are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but have somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is what happened to USAID.”
Musk quipped that perhaps such individuals are “very good at investing, in which case we should take their investment advice perhaps.” But “mysteriously they get wealthy,” he said. “We don’t know why, where does it come from? I think the reality is they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer’s expense.”
Per Musk and Trump, DOGE also uncovered that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chiefly responsible for disaster relief, allegedly allocated millions for luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.
At the same time, citizens in large swaths of the American southeast continue to struggle in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. FEMA, then under the control of the Biden administration, had been widely lambasted for its response to the storms last year.
“We have a case in New York where a hotel is paid $59 million … because it’s housing migrants, illegal migrants,” Trump said during his news conference with Musk.
CatholicVote reported Tuesday that after this finding, the Trump administration’s DHS promptly fired four FEMA employees responsible for doling out the millions of dollars.
