Trump Lets Elon Musk Take the Reins in Surreal Joint Oval Office Appearance, Billionaire Awkwardly Defends DOGE Cuts
Elon Musk addressed reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday alongside President Donald Trump amid concerns he and DOGE staffers are on a rogue warpath to dismantle the federal government.
The billionaire defended his so-called Department of Government Efficiency and challenged what he called “the bureaucracy” – which he said was a threat to democratic rule.
Trump introduced Musk – who has spent weeks with staffers accessing sensitive government information and payment systems – giving him the reins as his administration has taken flak over transparency and other concerns about DOGE.
“I’m going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found, which are shocking – billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump said.
The president added, “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. Musk said:
So the – at a high level, if you say what is the goal of DOGE and I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well are we in a democracy? …If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to to the government, and if you have the rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, and 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 loop. We fix that feedback loop, and that the public – the public’s elected representatives, the president, the House, the Senate – decide what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.
There are good people who are 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 at if you look at the founders today and consider what do you think of the way things have turned out? Well, we have this unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways currently more power than any elected representative.
Musk said a large government was “not something that people want.”
“So it’s just something we’ve got and we’ve got to fix,” he said as Trump looked on. “And we’re also going to address the deficit. So we’ve got a $2 trillion deficit. And if this – if we don’t do something about this deficit, the country’s going bankrupt.”
Watch above via Fox News.
