During a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was asked about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse headed by Elon Musk.
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NewsTranscript
00:00There's a lot of talk from the Doge team, or from Elon Musk, about waste fraud and abuse and what they're finding.
00:07Have you seen much evidence of waste fraud and abuse?
00:11Because what they put on their wall of receipts, some of the top items, the biggest savings they allege to have implemented, turned out to be mistakes or just lies.
00:21Look, am I going to sit here and tell anybody in America that the United States government doesn't have a bureaucracy and there isn't waste?
00:27Of course there is.
00:28And do we all, you're Republican, conservative, progress.
00:31I was mayor of the city of Berlin.
00:32One of the things I'm proud of is we save money.
00:35We made the city more efficient.
00:36People pay taxes.
00:37They want to make sure their money goes to where it's supposed to go.
00:39We can do better than we're doing right now.
00:41Is there a contribution Elon Musk could make to the federal government that you would be?
00:45I think his name, I don't think he can do it.
00:48But do I think as a nation, as a Congress, as an administration, we got to sit down and say, how do we make breakthrough the bureaucracy and make the government more efficient?
00:56Yes.
00:57But I want to give you one example.
00:59And this worries me a whole lot.
01:02Trump gets up in his State of the Union, and all of you, many of you have heard it.
01:05And he says, oh, my goodness, millions and millions of senior citizens, 150 years age, 200 years of age.
01:13Remember that?
01:14Oh, they're all getting Social Security benefits.
01:18It's a lie.
01:19A total, absolute lie.
01:21I mean, according to the new guy who is going to become the Social Security administrator, Trump's own appointee, well over 99% of the benefits owed to people on Social Security were earned by the people on Social Security.
01:33It's just another lie.
01:34So a lot of what they're doing is, am I going to tell you the Veterans Administration is the most efficient organization in the world?
01:40No, it's not.
01:41But you don't simply, with a chainsaw, if you like, get rid of 83,000 people and then say, oh, it's not going to impact the quality of care that our veterans receive.
01:49I want you to meet.