Billionaire Elon Musk is at the helm of US President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, established to slash massive amounts of government spending as fast as possible. In just weeks they’ve dismantled agencies, cancelled programs and attempted to lay off tens of thousands of government workers.
Everyone agrees that the US government is a mess, that it’s spending more than it earns and something should be done. And yet, there are mass protests across America against what Musk is doing.
This week on If You’re Listening, can DOGE do what Musk and Trump say it will do?
00:00 Intro
01:00 A town called Gaza
02:21 DOGE cuts
03:19 Trump and Musk in the oval office
04:54 'Career America'
06:10 Iron Mountain limestone mine
08:36 Sacking the workers
09:45 State of the budget
11:16 Foreign aid, disasters and contraceptives
11:55 Public broadcasting
14:05 Social security
15:25 Al Gore's cuts to spending
16:50 DOGE ideas
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Everyone agrees that the US government is a mess, that it’s spending more than it earns and something should be done. And yet, there are mass protests across America against what Musk is doing.
This week on If You’re Listening, can DOGE do what Musk and Trump say it will do?
00:00 Intro
01:00 A town called Gaza
02:21 DOGE cuts
03:19 Trump and Musk in the oval office
04:54 'Career America'
06:10 Iron Mountain limestone mine
08:36 Sacking the workers
09:45 State of the budget
11:16 Foreign aid, disasters and contraceptives
11:55 Public broadcasting
14:05 Social security
15:25 Al Gore's cuts to spending
16:50 DOGE ideas
Watch all episodes of If You're Listening - in our playlist HERE
Subscribe: https://ab.co/3yqPOZ5
Welcome to ABC News In-depth, where you'll find our long-form journalism and other videos to help you understand what's going on in the world around you.
Watch more ABC News content ad-free on ABC iview: https://ab.co/2OB7Mk1
For more from ABC News, click here: https://ab.co/2kxYCZY
Get breaking news and livestreams from our ABC News channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC
Like ABC News on Facebook: http://facebook.com/abcnews.au
Follow ABC News on Instagram: http://instagram.com/abcnews_au
Follow ABC News on Twitter: http://twitter.com/abcnews
Note: In most cases, our captions are auto-generated.
#ABCNewsIndepth #ABCNewsAustralia
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00:00When Elon Musk and his government efficiency crack squad got to digging into the US federal budget
00:06Turns on!
00:07The White House started making all sorts of claims about the stuff they'd found
00:13And one of the first major scandals?
00:15Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door
00:20to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money
00:25Preposterous?
00:2650 million. And you know what's happened to them?
00:29They've used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?
00:34Yeah, how about that?
00:35Now it may or may not surprise you to hear that this story is not true
00:39I mean, to start with, condoms are designed to contain explosions, not cause them
00:45While the US has sent aid money to the International Medical Corps in the Gaza Strip
00:50None of that money was spent on contraceptives
00:53But here's a fun fact
00:55There are a lot of places around the world called Gaza
00:59There are towns called Gaza in Iowa, New Hampshire and Lebanon
01:03There's also a Gaza province in southern Mozambique
01:07in the middle of the world's biggest HIV hotspot
01:10I wonder if that's where the condoms were headed
01:13I'm not sure we should be sending 50 million dollars worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly
01:17I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about
01:20It wasn't 50 million dollars in condoms, by the way
01:23US foreign aid programs spend about 50 million dollars
01:27on contraceptives in Africa each year
01:307 million dollars of which is on condoms
01:33Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected
01:36Okay, maybe check if things are correct before saying them, it works for me
01:41But Elon Musk is saying a lot more things than me
01:46He has been posting an average of 150 times a day on his website X
01:53If he's sleeping six hours a night, as he says he does
01:55that means he's posting on X once every seven minutes
02:00Most of these posts are about scandalous government spending
02:04that he and his team from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE
02:09have found as they kick open the doors of government offices and rummage through their files
02:15You know, I'm doing this because I think it's critical to the future of the country
02:19He plans to cut two trillion dollars out of the US budget by the 4th of July 2026
02:25and then ride off into the sunset
02:27After that I hope I can not be in politics, that would be my hope
02:31The thing is, everyone agrees that the US government is a mess
02:34and everyone agrees that it's spending like 40% more than it earns
02:39and everyone agrees that something should be done
02:41And yet, there are mass protests across America against what Musk is doing
02:48Stop the coup, stop the grift, stop Elon Musk, take our country back
02:54So how did it get this far?
02:56If there is all this waste, why has nobody cut it already?
03:00And if Elon Musk is doing this the wrong way, what's the right way to do it?
03:05I'm Matt Bevan, and this is IF you're listening
03:08So, back to that press conference with Elon Musk and President Trump in the Oval Office
03:19Oh, and X, Musk's four-year-old son, he was there too
03:24X, are you okay?
03:26This is X, and he's a great guy, high IQ
03:30One of the things Musk talked about during this appearance with Trump was a limestone mine
03:35I'm like, what do you mean a mine?
03:36Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork
03:41As an overcastrian, when someone mentions a mine, my ears prick up
03:45We love a mine here
03:47See, a key part of Elon Musk's budget cutting plan
03:51is to reduce the size of the federal workforce by inviting people to retire
03:56We're told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000
04:01We're like, well, why is that?
04:03I'm intrigued
04:04Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper
04:09It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper
04:12Then it goes down a mine
04:15Now, as we've established, Elon Musk says a lot of things
04:18And some of the things he says are incorrect
04:21And should be corrected
04:22This isn't one of them, though
04:23This isn't a Gaza condom situation
04:26American retirement paperwork really is stored in a limestone mine
04:30This is actually, I think, a great anecdote
04:32I looked into it, and he's right
04:33It is a great anecdote
04:34And it actually helps you understand what Doge is trying to do
04:39But Elon tells it wrong
04:41So I'm going to take over from here
04:43If you want to make a difference
04:45And you're looking for a door to opportunity
04:49Career America, the U.S. government, is the right choice for you
04:55One of the reasons working for the U.S. government is the right choice for many people
04:59Is because the retirement benefits plan is, as far as American retirement plans go, pretty good
05:05But the process is really complicated
05:08When you retire, you fill in a long and very old-timey form
05:13It asks many specific questions about your life
05:16And everything you ever did for the federal government or military
05:19Because, depending on your answers, your benefits could go up or down
05:24You attach many documents to back up your answers
05:27And you send it to the government
05:29A team of people then check it all to make sure that you aren't lying
05:33And when I say check it, I don't mean they just read the forms
05:36They call every bit of the government you've ever worked in
05:40And get them to send more documents to them that they can check for themselves
05:45All of this generates a lot of paperwork
05:47Which needs to be kept secure and safe from fires and disasters
05:51This is how it's always been done
05:53And by the 1950s, there were just too many files to manage
05:57In some office building in Washington
05:59The government decided to shift them to a secure location in western Pennsylvania
06:05Provided by a company called Iron Mountain Atomic Storage
06:09Iron Mountain is one of the most protected places on earth
06:13The company bought up abandoned limestone mines around America
06:17And converted them into enormous secure storage facilities
06:21That could survive nuclear attacks
06:23This is where the government keeps patents of countless inventions
06:27The Social Security Administration is here
06:29By the end of the 70s, the government had moved all the staff
06:32Maintaining the system to the mine too
06:35If you're a retired federal employee, your file is down here too
06:39And here's the thing
06:41The system basically hasn't changed in decades
06:44It's all still done on paper
06:46This mine looks like something out of the 50s
06:48Because it was started in 1955
06:51It looks like it's like a time warp
06:53Now Musk says that the reason that only 10,000 people can retire every month
06:57Is because of an elevator
06:59The limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move
07:03Determines how many people can retire from the federal government
07:08And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire
07:14Doesn't that sound crazy?
07:15It does sound crazy
07:18And that's because it's nonsense
07:19For one thing, I've watched a lot of footage of the mine
07:22And they don't seem to get around in elevators
07:24They're driving stuff around in cars and trucks
07:27They're not basing decisions on elevator capacity
07:30The problem actually isn't in the mine
07:33It's the fact that it takes months of phone calls
07:36To double check the details on every retirement form
07:40Gathering together documents sent from all over the country
07:44They can only process 10,000 people a month
07:46Because that's how long the process takes
07:49Since 1980, more than $100 million has been spent
07:52Trying to figure out how to digitise the system
07:55But every attempt has failed
07:58It's not just a matter of digitising the records in the retirement office
08:01It's a matter of digitising the documented history
08:04Of everyone who has worked for the federal government in the last half century
08:09You could do this
08:11But it would require a lot of government spending in the short term
08:14Which would lead to massive savings in the long term
08:18In fact, these energy drink chugging weekend working technology literate doge boys
08:23Are maybe exactly the people that you want solving the problem
08:27But that's not what Elon Musk is suggesting though
08:30And that's not what doge is all about
08:33He wants to sack everyone in the mine
08:35So I think if we take those people and say like
08:37You know what, instead of working in a mineshaft
08:41Carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mineshaft
08:46You could do practically anything else
08:48And you would add to the goods and services of the United States
08:53In a more useful way
08:54But then who's going to process all of the retirement forms?
08:58Or are they all just going to pile up at the entrance to the paperwork mine?
09:01And setting that aside, let's say that Musk eliminated the mine tomorrow
09:05Let's say he eliminated the entire office of personnel management
09:09The retirement office belongs to
09:11Somehow got chap GPT or grok or whatever AI system to do all the work instead
09:17How much would that actually help with his mission?
09:19How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted 6.5 trillion dollar
09:26Harris Biden budget?
09:28Well, I think we can do at least 2 trillion
09:31Here's the thing
09:33It would barely make a dent
09:36I'm not just MAGA
09:38I'm Doc Gothic MAGA
09:44The US federal budget is huge
09:47When you're talking in billions and trillions of dollars
09:50It's hard to get a sense of scale
09:52I've got this big jar in front of me
09:54And I'm going to use it to represent the US federal budget
09:58The budget is 6.7 trillion dollars
10:01So I've filled the jar up with 6.7 litres of water
10:05If you're American, I mean, what a time to be alive, right?
10:08But also a litre is about a quart
10:10So this is 6.7 quarts
10:13Elon Musk wants to cut the federal budget by 2 trillion dollars
10:16So I've got a second jar that holds 2 litres of water
10:21To reach the goal, I've got to fill it right up to this line here
10:25And the department of government efficiency is going to fix that
10:28So for this to work, we're going to have to live a little bit in a parallel universe
10:32Where none of this is getting challenged in the courts
10:35Or stopped by the congress
10:37Trump and Musk are carrying on as though
10:39Those pesky democratic processes won't stop them
10:42And so for the next few minutes, we will too
10:45Okay, to start, let's scoop out the office of management and budget
10:50So empty that mine and the government's entire HR department with it
10:54Well, that's almost half a billion dollars
10:57I'm going to need the syringe for this
11:00Ready?
11:03There we go, half a billion dollars
11:06So we are now 0.02% of the way there
11:12So let's cut the entire US foreign aid budget to zero
11:17Cut aid to Ukraine, disaster zones
11:19The condom budget, all the way down to zero
11:21That is half of this little shot glass
11:24Out of the budget, let's...
11:28There we go
11:30Now, that's okay, still plenty of things that can be cut
11:33The other day, Trump was asked about the department of education
11:36Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately
11:38Look, the department of education's a big con job
11:41Bang, that's half a cup, a whole one of these glasses
11:44Hang on
11:47All right, now we're getting somewhere
11:49The last time Trump was president, he tried to cut public broadcasting
11:53Under President Trump's budget, the corporation for public broadcasting would get nothing
11:57No money for PBS, no funding for NPR
12:00He failed to do this last time, but let's say that this time he succeeds
12:04I'm going to need the syringe again
12:10Okay, we're really losing momentum a little bit now
12:13There is still a huge amount of water in this jar
12:16And very not much water in Elon's jar
12:19So let's go full Doge here and really swing the axe
12:23Let's eliminate NASA, the Department of Commerce, the CIA, the whole EPA
12:29The Arts Budget, the National Archives, the Smithsonian
12:33Let's privatise air traffic control and shut down the FAA
12:37Actually, why not shut down the entire US Department of Transportation
12:41And the Department of Labour
12:42Doge has been poking around there too
12:44Cut them all
12:45Well, we've managed to find a whole cup of water to take out
12:50Not a cup each, mind you
12:53All together
12:55One cup
12:58We're still not even a quarter of the way to Elon's target
13:04So why don't we start again
13:05I'll pour all of Elon's savings back into the budget
13:09Now, let's shut down the US government entirely
13:16Except for healthcare, social security and defence
13:19That is 785 billion dollars
13:24Here we go
13:25One, two, three and a half
13:34We're still not even halfway there
13:36So let's shut down the whole US military
13:39That's 850 billion dollars, so four cups
13:43One, two, three and four
13:52We're still short of the line
13:54That is because the vast majority of the US federal budget
13:58is social security and healthcare payments
14:00Which they say will not be affected
14:03Social security will not be touched, it'll only be strengthened
14:06We want to make sure that people who deserve to receive social security
14:10do receive it
14:11Trump says they're going to make savings there
14:13by finding people who are receiving payments fraudulently
14:18Some government estimates indicate that fraud
14:20may cost more than 500 billion dollars annually
14:24That, combined with a shutdown of the US government and the military
14:28Which we've already done
14:29Here's the 500 billion dollars going in
14:31One cup
14:33And another cup
14:36So eliminating all fraud
14:38combined with a total shutdown of the US government and military
14:41would get us past Elon Musk's target
14:44But a significant proportion of the people we've just sacked
14:47are there specifically to prevent fraud
14:50They're shuffling papers and making calls in limestone mines
14:55If you want to cut down on fraud
14:56you probably need more of those people, not less
15:01And if you want to cut down on fraud
15:04and cut the size of the US government workforce
15:06without entirely breaking the whole thing
15:09It has been done before
15:10There are ways to do it
15:12But Musk and Trump will not like them
15:15These ideas are not very dark gothic mega
15:19In September 1994
15:20US Vice President Al Gore stood in front of the White House
15:24and presented his plan to cut government spending
15:27It came in book and CD-ROM form
15:31And he told the press how he came up with the plan
15:33Most of these ideas in here are ones that federal employees
15:37at the grassroots level
15:39where the rubber meets the road
15:41have for years been saying
15:43Why don't they do this?
15:44He actually talked to the people who work in the government
15:47and worked with them to find efficiencies
15:50At the same time President Bill Clinton raised taxes
15:54Over the course of five years
15:56Clinton with Gore reduced the deficit from 290 billion dollars
16:01to a surplus
16:03which he planned to use to shore up the budget for the future
16:06We can do so by dedicating the lion's share of the surplus
16:10to saving social security and medicare
16:13and paying down the national debt
16:15It was quite an achievement
16:17Difficult, unpopular at times and complicated
16:20It is projected to be only the first of many
16:23As I said in the State of the Union
16:26America is on course for surpluses over the next quarter century
16:31I mean not quite
16:33They've got four years of surplus budgets and a quarter century on
16:37Well you remember the giant jar
16:40But if you want to bring down government debt
16:43that's how you do it
16:45But the thing is
16:46Doge isn't really about reducing government debt
16:50Elon Musk and Donald Trump think that the US government
16:52is staffed by corrupt, idiotic, wasteful, woke bureaucrats
16:57who love nothing more than getting in the way
16:59of their Make America Great Again mission
17:02Maybe they're from the last administration
17:04and they are in some cases
17:05You try and get them out as fast as you can
17:07They want to destroy the US government bureaucracy
17:10not save it
17:12And a lot of their cuts are about bringing
17:15the business of government in line with this ideology
17:19Cutting off spending on things like climate change
17:22foreign aid, diversity, equality and inclusion
17:26Government subscriptions
17:27The failing New York Times
17:30America's budget deficit isn't because of fat cat woke bureaucrats
17:35It's not because of condoms in Africa
17:36or mine shaft elevators
17:38It's because healthcare and social security
17:41is way more expensive than ever before
17:44If you wanted to fix it
17:46you could make careful reductions and raise taxes
17:51But I don't think either Trump or Musk
17:54are interested in that