‘The stuff we’re doing with the Treasury Department is so basic that you can’t believe it doesn’t exist already,’ Musk said.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already found payment inefficiencies and waste in its probes into the Treasury Department and Social Security Administration, the tech CEO said from the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump on Feb. 11.
“It’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It’s essential,” Musk said. “It’s essential for America to remain solid as a country.”
Musk made the comments during a signing ceremony for Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order directing all federal agencies to coordinate with DOGE in scaling down the size of the U.S. government.
Musk said that DOGE has already made significant findings at the Treasury Department and within the Social Security Administration, and offered ways to make federal workers more productive while responding to his critics in Washington.
Here are four takeaways from Musk’s Feb. 11 Oval Office appearance.
1. Treasury Department Payments
“The stuff we’re doing with the Treasury Department is so basic that you can’t believe it doesn’t exist already,” Musk said, describing DOGE’s efforts at the federal agency.
He described how many companies have systems that tag individual payments with categorization codes and allow workers to access a comment field to describe each payment.
“And if a payment is on the ‘Do Not Pay’ list, then you don’t actually pay it. None of those things are true currently” with the Treasury Department, Musk said, adding that many fraudulent recipients can take up to a year to get onto an agency’s “Do Not Pay list” while they keep receiving payments in the process.
He suggested that is one of several reasons federal agencies like the Department of Defense routinely fail audits.
“We’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present that haven’t been present,” Musk said. “Let’s look at each expenditure and say, ‘Is this actually in the best interest of people?’ And if it is, it’s proved. If it’s not, we should think about it.”
A federal judge recently issued a restraining order blocking DOGE from accessing government payment systems at the Treasury Department, and on Feb. 11, another judge turned down the government’s request to dissolve that order.
The original restraining order blocked Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” and others in DOGE who are not civil servants from accessing the payment records.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas declined to dissolve the order but agreed to modify it to clarify that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Senate-confirmed senior department officers are not prohibited from accessing the department’s payment systems. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.
By Jacob Burg
