Elon Musk cherry-picked his more seasoned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lieutenants for a primetime interview on Fox News Thursday, opting to leave out the numerous twenty-something foot soldiers—and even several teenagers—who have dominated news cycles with their hostile takeovers of agencies across the federal government.
The billionaire used the opportunity to introduce to the public some of the leaders spearheading his slash-and-burn approach to government reform, sitting down for a question-and-answer session on Special Report with Bret Baier.
In all, seven DOGE staffers joined the interview to share their own perspective on why they decided to join the effort to reduce the size and cost of government.
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They included:
- Steve Davis, Musk’s top lieutenant on the project, who has also worked at SpaceX and X.
- Aram Moghaddassi, an engineer at DOGE who previously worked for Musk at X, xAI, and Neuralink according to Business Insider.
- Joe Gebia, the co-founder of Airbnb who, as written on Fox News, is working on a “digital retirement project” at DOGE.
- Brad Smith, a healthcare entrepreneur overseeing the Health and Human Services Department on behalf of DOGE.
- Anthony Armstrong, a former banker who reportedly helped Musk acquire Twitter and is now overseeing the Office of Personnel Management on behalf of DOGE.
- Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group and DOGE’s watchdog at the Treasury Department.
- Tyler Hassen, DOGE’s representative at the Interior Department.
Musk notably left out the agency’s most high-profile staffer to date: 19-year-old Edward Coristine, better known online under the handle “Big Balls.” The teen captured the internet’s collective attention when it was revealed that he was working as a “senior adviser” in the State Department—specifically, the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
“Big Balls” is joined by a number of youngsters on the DOGE team, most of whom were revealed to be under 26 with minimal work experience last month. The young avengers have reportedly been carrying out the lion’s share of DOGE’s legwork, going from one federal building to the next to crack into their computer systems and unmask potential fraud.
Thursday’s almost hour-long interview featured a flurry of Musk’s standard talking points on DOGE’s mission. He took particular aim at the Social Security Administration and the Small Business Administration, adding his usual statements about widespread waste, fraud, and abuse that—so far—he has not been able to locate.
“When I say our job is tech support, I really mean it,” Musk said in the interview. “What we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, preventing research from happening, extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we’re fixing it.”
“We really believe that the government can have an Apple store like experience,” Airbnb’s Gebia added. “Beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”
Moghaddassi, the DOGE engineer, also weighed in on his personal findings at the Social Security Administration, and claimed he discovered that 40 percent of the calls made to the SSA are from fraud centers and lead to scams. He and Musk went on to suggest that so many of these scams happen every day that the fraudsters are able to “change where the money is flowing.”
Davis piled on, saying there are an “enormous” amount of issues at the SSA.
“There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120, that are marked as alive in the Social Security system,” he claimed.
Similar stories from Musk and his deputies have prompted a number of fact-checks—including a number of news reports that found people above the age of 100 are not being paid en masse, despite their data being retained in the system.
In fact, even if Davis’ claims were true, it would not matter to the agency’s bottom line—its system automatically halts benefits to accounts older than 115. Several years ago the SSA, citing financial responsibility, opted not to employ a $9 million fix to remove old accounts from the system, instead simply halting payments for individuals when they are reported dead.
Musk, however, stressed that these failures still represent a crisis of government—because the fraud sometimes trickles to other departments.
He and Davis claimed at one point that the Small Business Administration has given out $300 million worth of loans to people below the age of 11 and people above the age of 120. Armstrong proceeded to note, “You’re giving a loan to a 9-month-old, which happened in one case, because you are not cross-referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates.”
“There were multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another,” he continued. “And if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.”
When Baier asked whether the rampant cuts to SSA staff and agency resources would threaten individuals’ benefits, Musk demurred, saying that DOGE’s work will result in “more Social Security, not less.”
“I want to emphasize that as a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money,” Musk claimed. “And let the record show that I said this, and it can be proven out to be true. Let’s check back on this in the future.”
Musk’s DOGE squad also claimed that they found billions wasted on government surveys asking people if they “like the national park.”
“The simple survey that was, literally, 10-question survey you could do it with Survey Monkey, cost you about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that,” Musk claimed. “A billion dollars for a simple online survey - ‘Do you like the national park?’
“There appeared to be no feedback with what would be done with that survey,” he added.
It remains unclear what survey he was referring to.
