Jay Weber Show transcript 3-31-25
I have talked -in the past- about a major mistake Trump and Elon Musk has made with this Doge effort was ‘not explaining it more fully to the American people.’
As it is-this is an effort to cut waste and fraud and reduce the size of govt bloat that two-thirds of the American people support. They still have solid support for it-
But if musk and trump had spent more time explaining ‘what this effort is’ and ‘the level of fraud’ and insider ‘swampy grift’ that they are looking to eliminate-
I swear it would have 80 to 85 percent support among the American people.
In fact-the half hour interview that Bret Baier did with musk and his top doge cutters on Friday should be mandatory viewing for all voting age Americans.
Because it was quite enlightening. I am going to boil it down for those listeners who did not’ see it-or do not want to sit through it, though, because it is that important.
This was musk and his top doge experts- (who are not inexperienced little ‘twenty-somethings’ by the way. Every one of them is a phenomenally successful and innovative business person in his own right -who musk and trump ‘called out of’ the private sector to help them reform government.
And some of the things we learned were astounding-including the fact that they are saving about four-billion dollars a day. That is a goal they set out to hit and they are achieving it...simply because...as musk said: the sheer amount of waste and fraud in government is astonishing.
Among the things they have found there are more federal credit cards being circulated and used than there are ‘federal employees.
I’m not going to ‘name and credential’ every business leader who was on this panel-but the guy in charge of investigating spending is
He also found it astonishing that ‘all the governments, our entire federal government, work out of one bank account. The federal treasury. All money is pulled from there-and no one is really watching what is being pulled out of it. That bank account serves six hundred govt agencies...and until recently...this doge expert says ‘whatever request’ came into the treasury-they just sent out the payment- no questions asked. With no verification-our treasury is simply cranking out checks as fast as it possibly can. And that is no exaggeration.
No wonder they believe there is at least a half trillion dollars in fraud every year.
Honestly.
Out of a federal treasury that takes in about 4 and a half or five trillion dollars a year- trying to cover the costs of seven trillion dollars in spending-
Half a trillion dollars- or about one out of every eight or ten dollars spent- is lost to fraud.
Why have we put up with this -if we have?
And who would be against ‘ending it’ now? Moving forward?
He said they found seven hundred different ‘IT’ systems in just one agency. The national institute for health has 700 IT systems.
Why?
He said they don’t talk to each other, and they are managed to 27 different chief information officers. For no reason.
They found the health and human services department has 40 different communications offices. Again- for no reason.
I love this one: they found that the IRS has 14-hundred different employees whose job is to hand out cell phones and laptops to new workers.
One-thousand-400 workers- dedicated to this single, menial task.
When it comes to social security and ‘dead people’...they have found the dead and the ‘non-existent’ living off government fraud- across all departments.
Last week, we highlighted the 300-million dollars in small business loans that have gone to children under the age of eleven-and dead-if you believe the SBAS books.
When it comes to ‘social security’...they have fifteen million fraudulent social security numbers. Fifteen million.
They also found- and this is astonishing-
Folks, they have found that half of the phone calls that come into the social security administration every day- are criminals trying to change people’s ‘direct deposit’ bank accounts to steal their social security checks.
Imagine how screwed up our system needs to be-in order for half of all incoming calls to be global criminals trying to defraud the system-and- in many instances- succeeding.
All this needs to be cleaned up.
Also- if not for musk and trump- we never would have known about the literal filing system we keep ‘in a mine’ to hold all of the social security records. This system is being digitized and modernized for the first time in the existence of the social security agency.
The only reason there is nine months’ wait for paperwork is that we have a giant cave with 22-thousand filing cabinets in it and 400-million pieces of paper.
Doge is taking the process digital- with the assistance of air b-n-b billion are Joe Gebbia. He has been the one trying to figure out and ‘fix’ this for the American people.
In fact-
In another surprise to me-Elon Musk said all of doge’s work-including finding a trillion dollars in cuts- he believes-
Can still be accomplished in the 130 or so days that he and Trump planned for.
Musk says the goal is to reduce govt spending by 15 percent-and he sees that as ‘entirely achievable’ given the sort of fraud and waste they are finding. Musk says they can do this without touching or cutting any critical govt services- or entitlements.
In fact- he emphasized again: if they can cut the fraud and waste out of social security and the other big entitlements- there will be more money for the recipients. And that makes complete sense, of course.
The bottom line is: the real Doge is-and has been- a very logical, impressive, and thoughtful process....and you know that the leftist media coverage was going to smear and mischaracterize it from the very beginning-but musk and trump would have had a lot less controversy if musk and these fine men had sat down and done this interview with Beier four weeks ago.
Still-they needed some time to find and catalog some of this fraud- so- the follow-up interview would have been powerful.
But- these are not ‘twenty something’ hackers slashing and burning government. Not even close.
The democrats and their accomplices in the media hopped on this early- because they knew what a serious threat it posed to their cherished sacred cows and the decades of fraud and corruption that they had managed to build-and entrench-in our government over time.
And so-the angry rhetoric of the leftists was to be expected-
In truth?
This is a very measured and logical and impressive effort that all Americans would likely ‘get behind’ if they knew the truth of the
The numbers speak for themselves: we have a national debt that’s 37-trillion dollars. This year, again, our govt is on pace to spend two trillion dollars more than we take in.
Moreover-this year- taxpayers will pay a trillion dollars just on interest payments on that national debt.
This is an unsustainable system. And the real problem is excessive spending and massive waste and fraud.
These things-must. Change- and dramatically.
Last night, Elon Musk and a member of the Doge team spelled out it out at his town hall in Green Bay.
photo credit: Elon Musk's X account
audio version of the segment here > Elon Musk's town hall exposed SS fraud to over 2 million X users