runs an hour. >> good morning. how are you? ready for snowmageddon? we were supposed to get snow last week. [inaudible] >> the shots are coming. >> jeez. thank you all for being here. mrs. mcclain: republicans are making america secure and competitive. we're passing two bills. >> we're going to leave this for coverage of president trump

signing new executive orders at the white house. president trump: : this is x, a high i.q. individual. elon: check this out. packer: we had president trump: we had a terrific discussion concerning gaza. we had discussions saturday at 12:00. it's going to be a big moment. we'll see what happens. i don't expect much happening with these people but we'll see what happens and we'll be signing a very important deal today with doge and i'll ask elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things we found which was shocking. millions and millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. and i think it's very important. and that's one of the reasons i

got elected. i say we're going to do that. nobody had any idea it was that bad and that corrupt. it seems hard to believe judges want to try and stop us for looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. we want to weed out the corruption. and it seems hard to believe a judge could say we don't want you to do that. well, maybe we have to look at the judges because that's very serious. i think it's a very serious violation. i'll ask elon musk to say a few words and we'll take some questions. elon, go ahead. elon: sure. so at a high level, you say what is the goal of doge and i think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. you may say aren't we in a democracy? if you don't have a feedback --

sorry. gravitas can be difficult sometimes. so if there's the not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? 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, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. so it's incredibly important that we close that feedback, that we fix that feedback loop and that the public, the public's elected representatives, the president, the house, and the senate decides what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy. it's not to say there aren't -- there are some good people in the federal bureaucracy but you can't have an autonomous federal

bureaucracy. you have to have one that's responsive to the people. that's the whole point of a democracy. and so if you looked -- if you looked at us today and said what do you think of the way things have turned out? we have this unelected, unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy which has in a lot of ways currently more power than any elected representative. and it's not something the people want. and it's not -- it does not match the will of the people. and it's something we've got to fix. we've also got to address the deficit. so we've got a $2 trillion deficit and if we don't do something about this deficit, the country is going bankrupt. it's really astounding that the interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the defensive public budget which is shocking.

we spent -- spend a lot of money on defense. if that keeps going, we're essentially going to bankrupt the country. what i want to say, is it's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses, it's essential. it's essential for america to remain solvent as a country and it's essential for america to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be seeing vast amounts of debt. president trump: and also, can you mention some of the things your team have found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million, etc.? elon: we find it rather odd there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostencibly a salary of a few hundred dollars but manage to accrue tens of millions of worthwhile in that position, which is what happened at usaid

and we're curious to where it came from. maybe they're very good at investing and maybe we should take their investment advice, perhaps. but it seems to be mysteriously they get wealthy, why? where did it come from? i think the reality is they're getting wealthy at the taxpayers' expense. that's the honest truth of it. so we're looking at, say, if you look at treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure any given payment has the payment categorization code that there's a comment field that describes the payment and if a payment is on the do not pay list that you don't actually pay it. none of those things are true currently. so the reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. it's a massive number of blank

checks flying out of the building. you can't recognize the blank check. you have comment fields also blank that you don't know why the payment was made and then we have a do not pay list which can take up to a year for an organization to get on the do not pay list. and we're talking about terrorist organizations, we're talking about known fraudsters, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation can take up a year to get on the list and even once on the list, the list is not used. it's mind-blowing. so what we're talking here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that haven't been present. you say well, how could such a thing arise? that seems crazy? when you understand really that everything is geared towards complaint minimization. so then you understand the motivations. so if people receive money, they don't complain, obviously.

but if people don't receive money, they do complain. and the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest. so when you understand that, then it makes sense. oh, that's why everything -- they approve all the payments at treasury. if you approve all the payments, you don't get complaints. but now we're saying no, we actually are going to complain. if money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and approvable matter, it's not ok. your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on things that matter to the people. it is just common sense. it's not draconian or radical, i think. it's really just saying let's look at each of these expenditures and say is this actually in the best interest of the people? and if it is, it's approved and if not, we should think about it you know, crazy things, cursory

examination of social security. we have people in there that are 150 years old. now, do you know anyone that's 150? i don't. ok. they should be on the geneiss book of world records, they're missing out. so that's the case. i think they're probably dead is my guess. or they should be very famous, one of the two. and then a whole bunch of social security payments where there's no identifying information. why is there no identifying information? we want to make sure people who deserve to receive social security do receive it and that they receive it quickly and accurately. himself, another crazy thing, so one thing, we're trying to right-size the federal bureaucracy and just trying to make sure -- there need to be a lot of people working for the federal government but not as many as currently. we're saying well, if people can retire, you know, with full

benefits and everything, that would be good, they can retire with full time payments and everything. and this is a great anecdote. we're told the most number of people that can retire possibly in a month is 10,000. why is that? well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper, manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper and goes down a mine. yeah. there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. and you look at a picture of this mine. we'll post pictures afterwards. this mine looks like something out of the 1950's because it was started in 1955. it looks like a time warp. and the limiting factor is the speed at which the mineshaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. and the elevator breaks down sometimes and nobody can retire.

doesn't that sound crazy? there's like 1,000 people that work on this. if we take those people and say you know what, instead of working in a mineshaft that carry manila envelopes to boxes in a mineshaft, you can do practically anything else and you would add to the goods and services of the united states in a more useful way. so anyway, that's an example. at a high level, how can we increase prosperity? if we get people to shift from roles from low to negative productivity to positive roles. and we increase the standard of living for everybody. that's the goal. everybody is quiet. reporter: your detractors, including a lot of democrats. elon: i have detractors?

i don't believe it. reporter: you do, sir, say you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a nontransparent way. what is your response to that criticism? elon: first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. the public voted -- if you have a majority of the public vote, voting for president trump, we won the house and won the senate. the people voted for major government reform. there should be no doubt about that. that was on the campaign. the president spoke about that at every rally. the people voted for major government reform and that's what the people are going to get. they are going to get what they voted for. a lot of times people that don't get what they voted for but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for and that's what democracy is all about. reporter: mr. musk, the white house says you will identify and

excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest you may have, does that mean you are in effect policing yourself? what are the checks and balances in place to ensure there is accountability and transparency? elon: we are trying to be as transparent as possible and we post our actions to the doge handle on x and to the doge website. so all of our actions are maximally transparent. i don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the doge organization. and so the kind of things we're doing is very simple and basic. what i mentioned, for example, about treasury, making sure that payments that goes out, taxpayer money that goes out is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained and organizations on the do not pay listings which takes a lot to get there, are actually not paid which currently they are paid. these are not individual

judgment decisions, these are about simply having checks and balances within the system itself to ensure taxpayer money is spent well. so, say, there's not a line of contract with my company at all. reporter: there is a conflict of interest when it comes to yourself, you for example received billions of dollars when it comes to contracts from the pentagon. which the government asks you to look in to. is there any checks and balances in place that would provide any transparency for the american people. elon: all of our actions are fully public. so if you is see anything, you say wait a second, hey, elon, that seems like maybe that's -- there's a conflict there, it's not like people will be shy about saying that. they'll say it immediately. reporter: to you yourself? elon: yes. transparency is what shows trust, not somebody asserting trust or saying they're trustworthy but transparency so you can see everything going on. and you can see, am i doing

something that benefits one of my countries or not? it's totally obvious. president trump: if we thought that we wouldn't let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest. and we watch that, also. he's a big businessman and successful guy and why we want him doing this. we don't want an unsuccessful guy doing this. now, one thing, also, that elon hasn't really mentioned are the groups of people that are getting some of these payments. they're ridiculous. and we're talking about billions of dollars that we've already found. we found fraud and abuse, i would say those two words as opposed to the third word i usually use. but in this case fraud and abuse. it's abusive because most of these things are virtually made up or certainly money shouldn't be sent to them and you know what i'm talking about, it's crazy.

we're talking about tens of billions of dollars we've already found and now a judge who is an activist judge wants to try and stop us from doing this. why in? why would they want us to do this? i campaigned on the fact i said government is corrupt. and it is very corrupt. it's also foolish, as an example, a man has a contract for three months and the contract ends but they keep paying him for the next 20 years, you know, because nobody ends the contract. you've got a lot of that. you've got a contract that's a three-month contract, now normally if you're in a small -- and in all fairness, the size of this thing is so big. but if you have a contract and you're in a regular business, you end the contract in three months, you know it's a consultant. here's a contract for three months but it goes on for 20 years. and the guy doesn't say that he got money for 20 years, you know. they don't say it but keep getting checks month after month and you have various things like that and even much worse than

that, actually, much worse. and i guess you call that incompetence maybe. it could be corruption, it could be a deal is made on both sides in a way. a guy gets the money and -- i think there's a lot of kickback here. elon: a lot of kickback. president trump: tremendous kickback. nobody can be so stupid to give out these contracts so he has to get a kickback. that's what i got elected for, that and borders and military and a lot of things but this is a big part of it. i hope the court system will allow us to do what we have to do. we got elected among other things to find all this fraud and abuse and this horrible stuff going on. we already found billions of dollars, not just a little bit, but billions. many billions of dollars. and when you get down to it, it will be probably close to $1 trillion that we're going to find.

it will have quite an impact on the budget. elon: yes. president trump: and they'll go and handpick a judge and he has certain leanings, i'm not knocking anybody for that but he has certain leanings and wants us to stop looking. how do you stop looking? we already found it. we have a case in new york where a hotel is paid $59 million because it is housing migrants, illegal migrants. all illegal, i believe. elon: and paid twice the normal room rate at 100% accuracy. it's a racket. and if i may go after the president's comments, at a high level, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half, from $2 trillion to $1 trillion? it's really two things. competence and caring. and if you add competence and

caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half. i fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, i might as well camp out there. it's not like i think i can get away with something, i'll be scrutinized nonstop. but we can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and with deregulation, because there are a lot of regulations that don't serve the public good. we need to free america to build. and if we do that, we can get the economic growth to be maybe 3% or maybe 5%. that's if you can get $1 trillion of economic growth and cut the budget deficit by $1 trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. there's no inflation in 2026 and if the government is not borrowing much, interest costs

decline and mortgage and carp payment and credit card bills, their student debt, their monthly payments drop. that's a fantastic scenario. for the average american. imagine going down the grocery aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same? and their mortgage and all the debt payments dropped? how great is that for the average american. that's what we're aiming for. president trump: we had no idea we'd find this much. it's open. it's not complicated. it's simple stuff. elon: it's a lot of work. president trump: a lot of work and smart people involved, very, very smart people. but you're talking about anywhere, maybe $500 billion. it's crazy the kind of numbers we're talking about. normally you're looking for one out of 100. here you're almost reversing it

and you look for one that's good and you look at the title and say why are we doing this, why are we doing that? the public gets it. you've seen the pulse. the public is saying why are we paying all this money? for years this has gone on. reporter: senator rand paul said doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in congress. do you agree with that? is that the plan? president trump: i don't know this. we're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse. if i need a vote of congress to find fraud and abuse, it's fine with me. i think we'll get the vote but there are some who wouldn't vote. how would a judge want to hold us back from finding all this fraud and all of this incompetence? why would that happen? why would even congress want to do that? if we come need a vote, we'd get a very easy vote. we have a track record now. we've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence and corruption. a lot of corruption.

reporter: if a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling? president trump: i always abide by the courts and then have to appeal it. what he's done is slowed down the momentum and gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. if a person is crooked and get caught, other people see that and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. the answer is i always abide by the courts, always abide by them. and we'll appeal. but appeals take a long time and i would hope that a judge -- if you go into a judge and show them here's a corrupt situation, we have a check to be sent but found it to be corrupt, you want us to send this corrupt check to a person or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer? i would hope a judge would say don't send it, give it back to the taxpayer. elon: if i can add to it, what we're finding is a bunch of it is not even going to americans.

if there's going to be fraud, it should at least go to americans. but a bunch of the fraud rings operating in the united states and taking advantage of the federal government, especially in the entitlele programs are actually foreign fraud rings and exporting money to other countries. we should stop that. and this is big numbers, over $100 billion to $200 billion a year. serious money. reporter: mr. musk, this is on x, that an example of fraud you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to gaza, but after fact check this, apparently gaza and mozambique and the problem was to protect them against h.i.v. can you correct the statements that it wasn't sent to hamas, it was sent to mozambique which makes sense why condoms were sent there and how can we make true all the statements you say are correct and we can trust what you say? elon: some of the things i say will be incorrect and should be corrected. nobody is going to bat 1.000.

we'll make mistakes but act quickly to correct any mistakes. i'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms anywhere, frankly. i'm not sure that's something americans would be really excited about. that's really a enormous number of condoms when you think about it. but if it went to mozambique instead of gaza, it's not as bad but still, why are we doing that? reporter: can you talk about how closely you're working with agency heads as you're directing these cuts? how much input do agency heads have when making these decisions? elon: we work closely with the agency heads. yeah. so there are sort of checks in place. it's not just going in and doing things willy-nilly. it's working closely with the agency heads and check with the president to make sure this is what the president wants to have

happen. so we talk almost every day and, you know, i double-check things to make sure is this something, mr. president, you want us to do this, then we'll do it. reporter: usaid has been one of your main targets, are you concerned that shutting down that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to the united states? elon: yeah. an interesting example. that's something where we work closely with the state department and secretary rubio and we have, for example, turned on funding for ebola prevention and h.i.v. prevention. and we are moving fast and we all make mistakes but also fix the mistakes very quickly. reporter: you think it's a worthy cause, usaid. elon: there are some worthy things but overall, you say what is the bang for the buck, it's not very good. and there was far too much of

what usaid was doing, influencing elections in ways that i think were dubious and do not stand the light of day. reporter: with regard to the pentagon contracts, if you have received billions in contracts from the pentagon and the president is directing you to look into the department of defense -- is that a conflict of interest? elon: we'll do it at the president's request. reporter: is that a conflict? elon: i'm not filing the contract, it's someone from space x. but if you see any contract where it was awarded to space x and wasn't by far the best value of money for the taxpayer, let me know because every one of them was. reporter: the president said the other day you might look at treasuries. could you explain that a little bit? what kind of fraud -- that question goes to both of you, what kind of fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in u.s. treasuries?

elon: i think you mean the u.s. treasury department as opposed to treasuries. reporter: you referenced treasuries the other night. elon: as i mentioned earlier, the first order of business is to make sure we're collecting -- sorry for this. my son might enjoy this but he's sticking his fingers in my ear sometimes. hey, stop that. no, the stuff we're doing with the treasury department is so basic that you can't believe it doesn't exist already. so, for example, like i mentioned, making sure when a payment goes out, it has to have a payment categorization code, like what type of payment is this? you can't just leave the field blank. currently many of the fields are left blank and you have to describe what is the payment for, some basic rationalization, and it's also left blank. when is the last time the

pentagon passed an order, ever, really? and we want to pass an audit, you have to have financial information that allows you to trace the payments. so, you know, once in a while, the treasury has to force payments if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. stop the payment. if a company or organization is on a do not pay list, we should not pay it, i'm sure you would agree. it's quite hard to get on the do not pay list and this means it's someone that is -- dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that kind of thing, we should not pay them. but currently we do, which is crazy. we should stop that. president trump: by the way, hundreds -- thousands of transactions like that. we have a big team.

and for the sake of the country, i hope that the person that's in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge are allowed to do the right thing, namely make sure everything is honest, legitimate, and competent. but we're looking at just -- when you look at usaid, that's one. we're going to look at the military and education and they are much bigger areas. but the usaid is really corrupt, i'll tell you. it's corrupt and incompetent and really corrupt. i can't imagine a judge saying well, it may be corrupt but you don't have the right -- you got elected to look over the country and to, i say, make america great again but you don't have the right to look and see whether or not things are right that they're paying or things are honest that they're paying p. and nobody can even believe this. other people, law professors, they've been saying how can you take that person's right away, you're supposed to be running the country but we're not

allowed to look at who they're paying it to and what they're paying? we have massive amounts of fraud we caught. i think we probably caught way over a lot of billions of dollars already in two weeks? elon: yes. president trump: and it's going to numbers you're not going to believe. and much is incompetence and dishonesty. we have to catch it and the only way we're going to catch it is look for it. if a judge is allowed to say you're not allowed to look for if, it's pretty sad for our country and can't understand how it can work. reporter: can you personally guarantee the buyout program, the offer to federal workers, can you personally guarantee the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid through september? president trump: they'll get their money. they're getting a good deal and a big buyout. we're trying to reduce government. there's too many people. we have office space occupied by 4% and nobody is showing up to work because they were told not to. and biden gave them a five-year

pass, 45,000 of them. for five years you don't have to show up to work. let me tell you, this is largels biden's fault. he allowed our country -- what he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with all of these contracts that have come out. it's a very sad day when we look at it. i can't believe it. many contracts extend and keep extending and there's nobody there to correct it. and that cannot be -- i can't imagine that's going to be held up by the court. any court that would say the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn't have the right to go over their books and make sure everything is honest, i mean, how can you have a country? you can't have anything that way. you can't have a business that way or a country that way. thank you very much, everybody. thank you. [captions copyright national

cable satellite corp. 2024] president trump: we'll be at the white house at 10:00 and if you want to say hello to elon, you can. reporter: would you say anything in return? president trump: we were treated very nicely by russia, actually. i hope that's the beginning of a relationship we can end the war and millions of people can stop being killed. they lost millions of people. in terms of soldiers, they lost probably 1.5 million soldiers a short period of time. we've got to stop that war. and i'm interested primarily from the standpoint of death. we're losing all those soldiers. and they're not american soldiers. they're ukrainian and russian soldiers but you're probably talking about 1.5 million. i think we've got to bring that to an end. ok. thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite co24] >> on thursday, the senate

judiciaryommittee meets to vote on whether to send kash patel's nomination for f.b.i. director to the full senate for consideration. this comes after an initial vote was delayed by one week at committee who continue to call hearing with mr. patel.on you can watch the committee vote live at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-an 3, c-span now, our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. >> listening to programs on c-span through c-span radio is easy. tell your smart speaker "play c-span radio" and listen to "washington journal." important affair events. catch "washington today" and listen to c-span any time. tell your smart speaker, "play c-span radio." c-span, created by cable.

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