Donald Trump says he’ll task Elon Musk with auditing the entire federal government
Image: Laura Normand / The VergeFormer President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday,...
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Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”
Musk’s companies are recipients of government spending, with records showing Tesla has received nearly 13 percent of the EV charging awards granted as part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, according to Politico. Meanwhile, SpaceX has received billions in federal funding since its inception.
As we noted after Musk endorsed Trump in July, that came despite the former president’s support of a plan to roll back the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. It would eliminate the tax credit incentive for electric vehicles, but Musk claimed in a tweet that it would “only help Tesla.”
Trump says the commission comes “at the suggestion” of the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who previously showed his interest in such a role during an interview with Trump on X. Last month, Musk also posted what appears to be an AI-generated image of himself at a podium labeled “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk said on X following Trump’s speech. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”
During last month’s interview, the former president called Musk the “greatest cutter,” in reference to the thousands of workers he laid off at Tesla earlier this year, along with massive job cuts at Twitter that gutted around half of the company’s workforce.
