Tall tales and little transparency drive Trump and Musk’s US government wrecking ball

By CNN Newsource

Published February 12, 2025 3:00 pm

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — The Mack truck Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are driving through the government as we know it is fueled by some stories that aren’t true, but fester anyway.

Justifying their plan to gut the federal workforce and slash government spending, Musk and Trump told tales on Tuesday of a federal government abused by rapacious fraudsters wasting your tax dollars.

Which millionaire federal worker?

Trump mentioned “the woman that walked away with about $30 million” after working a federal job.

“They’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense,” Musk said. “That’s the honest truth of it.”

Except:

Which millionaire federal worker? Why haven’t Trump and Musk referred this person for prosecution? Who are they talking about?

He didn’t say in the Oval Office, but Musk has shared on his social media platform X a meme questioning the finances of Samantha Power, the former USAID director. We know about Power’s finances and wealth created by her and her husband’s successful book, teaching and speaking careers, because she, unlike Musk, filed and posted public ethics paperwork.

Some things “will be incorrect”

Musk’s stories of waste and abuse are the basis for his campaign to cut the government, but they don’t always turn out to be true, as he admitted Tuesday.

“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said when a journalist asked him about his unproven claim that the US had sent $50 million to Gaza for condoms.

There’s no evidence of any large-scale USAID funding for condoms in Gaza, although the US has tried to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa. One part of that program is providing condoms, under a program started by President George W. Bush. There’s no evidence the US spent $50 million on condoms for any single country, according to CNN’s fact check by Daniel Dale.

That didn’t stop both Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt from repeating and embellishing Musk’s claim.

Rather than correct himself Tuesday, Musk repeated the specious $50 million figure.

“I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly,” he said. Musk is notably concerned about population rates and made the comments about condoms while holding one of his dozen children on his shoulders. PEPFAR, the AIDS prevention program, is estimated to have saved 25 million lives, according to supporters.

Musk used that unsubstantiated condom story to help justify shuttering USAID, the international aid agency created in 1961 by Congress and President John F. Kennedy.

Trump administration officials have also pointed to any USAID program focused on diversity or gender, arguing taxpayers shouldn’t be funding programs like that, which is a valid political point to make. But instead of cutting those programs, they have tried to cut the entire agency.

After flood of misinformation, an effort to close FEMA

Days after taking office, Trump visited parts of North Carolina devastated by flooding following Hurricane Helene. Misinformation circulated during the presidential campaign had suggested, falsely, that FEMA was behind a land grab to take people’s property, that it was spending disaster funding to house migrants. None of that was exactly true.

But Trump wants to nix the agency so individual states can take federal money to spend on their own disaster relief.

“When there’s a problem with a state, I think that that problem should be taken care of by the state. That’s what we have states for — they take care of problems, and a governor can handle something very quickly,” Trump said during that January North Carolina trip.

FEMA was created by an executive order signed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, but formalized by Congress in 1988 and funded by congressional appropriations,

Trump’s Homeland Security director, Kristi Noem, endorsed the end of FEMA in an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union last week.

“We don’t need this bureaucracy that’s picking and choosing winners,” Noem said.

DHS recently fired four FEMA officials who it said had, apparently as part of an existing federal program funded by Congress, sent $59 million to New York City for temporary migrant housing in the city. Musk alleged on X the payments violated the law even though the program was funded by Congress.

This is not a normal type of transparency

Musk argued in the Oval Office that all of his government cuts are above-board and out in the open since he posts about them on X.

The Department of Government Efficiency is Musk’s organization, which has been installed inside the executive branch. Trump deputized the organization on Tuesday with broad new power to oversee cutting across the government.

“I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization,” Musk said.

But the posts that announce actions are far from detailed. There’s no public plan for DOGE and little in the way of details about Musk’s ultimate goals. The way the agency has been set up in the White House could help it skirt various government transparency laws, like the Freedom of Information Act.

“I think the Trump administration has taken every step possible to shield DOGE and Mr. Musk’s operations from the public light,” said Donald Sherman, chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of the many groups that is suing to slow down and shine a light on what Musk and Trump are doing.

CREW has filed 62 FOIA requests to get more information, Sherman said. He argued that if Musk were truly being transparent, there would be a DOGE org chart, a public plan, and Musk would be testifying on Capitol Hill before the DOGE subcommittee set up by Republicans in the House to help him.

Rather than a list of DOGE employees, we are left to connect dots about who is being installed at agencies across the government. Musk, after taking a poll of his followers on X, said he would rehire Marko Elez, the 25 year-old working for DOGE who resigned after the Wall Street Journal uncovered a social media account linked to him that had posted support for racism and eugenics.

Government agencies have inspectors general whose job is to identify waste and abuse in their agencies. Trump fired a large number of them when he took office. He also fired USAID’s inspector general this week after his office wrote a report arguing the firing of a large number of USAID employees increases the lieklihood that US taxpayer dollars go to terror groups.

Some ‘common sense’ fixes

As he ticked off examples of government waste, Musk did mention some known issues that, as he said, are just “common sense.”

There are Social Security benefits being paid well past a normal lifetime, Musk said, adding that benefits are being paid to a person who would be the unbelievable age of 150.

Payments to dead people is a known problem and one the government has continuously tried to address. In fact, in the days before Trump took office, the Treasury Department announced successful results of a new pilot program, authorized by Congress, to grant the Treasury Department access to the Social Security Administration’s Full Death Master File. More than $31 million in improper payments were recovered over a five-month period, according to David Lebryk, a top career Treasury official at the time.

Lebryk is the same career official who resigned from the Treasury Department after people from DOGE, including Elez, the 25 year-old who appeared to be linked to racist musings on social media, demanded access to the Treasury Department’s payment system.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that the name of Elon Musk’s agency in the US government is the Department of Government Efficiency.