Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk exposed the “dirty little secret” about the federal government’s spending after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) discovered that officials at the U.S. Department of the Treasury were “instructed always to approve payments,” even if the payments were made to “fraudulent or terrorist groups.”
In a Saturday post on X, formerly Twitter, Musk wrote, “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”
Musk also shared a post by Robby Starbuck, who tweeted, “The highest ranking Treasury official, David A Lebryk, is resigning rather than complying with a request by @DOGE for access to audit where they’ve spent trillions of dollars a year. Why would career bureaucrats fear an audit by @elonmusk and @doge to see where we can save money?”
Musk’s bombshell accusation against the U.S. Treasury came just prior to a report by The New York Times that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had granted DOGE access to the department’s payment system. According to Fox News, the Treasury issues approximately $6 trillion in payments for various federal agencies each year.
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Asked about Musk’s effort to expose the federal government’s wasteful spending during an interview with Fox News, Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary said, “I’m okay with it, and I think the American people are okay with it. Everybody knows the dirty little secret about government. It drips with fat.”
O’Leary told Fox News that no one has ever attempted to review the government’s spending in the same way that Musk and DOGE are currently reviewing it.
“No one’s ever done an exercise like this. I thought he’d get a lot more pushback from Congress, and he’s not,” O’Leary said. “He’s going in there with a spatula, and he’s scraping out billions of dollars, and people are okay with it. After all, it’s taxpayers’ money. Why not do this? If you sit around your kitchen table, you got to have a budget every year. Why can’t we apply the same kind of philosophy to government?”
O’Leary explained that despite the “controversial” nature of Musk, the billionaire and top Trump ally has been permitted a “lot of slack” to investigate the federal government’s wasteful spending because no one else has the “executional skills” that he has.
“There’s nobody like him,” O’Leary added. “Let him do his thing.”
