US President Donald Trump on Friday said that he had directed Elon Musk to review expenditure at the US Department of Defense, which has proposed an $850 billion budget for 2025.
“I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad,” Trump informed reporters at the White House when questioned about whether defence spending was part of Musk’s cost-cutting agenda.
“Pentagon, Education, just about everything. We’re going to go through everything,” he added.
Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission focused on reducing government expenditure.
Trump also addressed Democratic concerns about DOGE’s activities being a power grab and whether he had set any boundaries for Musk’s scope of work.
“Well, we haven’t discussed that much. I’ll tell him to go here, go there. He does it. He’s got a very capable group of people, very, very, very, very capable,” Trump said.
“So, I’ve instructed him to go into Education, go into military go into other things as we go along. And they’re finding massive amounts of fraud, abuse, waste, all of these things, so. But I will pick out a target, and I say, ‘go in.’ There could be areas that we won’t, but I think everything’s fertile.”