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15-02-2025
WASHINGTON: Billionaire Elon Musk said on Thursday many federal government agencies must be eliminated as part of President Donald Trump’s push to radically overhaul the US government.
“We do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. Just leave part of them behind. It’s easy. It’s kind of like leaving a weed,” Musk said in a video call addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai.
“If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back but if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn’t stop weeds from ever going back, but it makes it harder.
“So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them.”
The comments came as Musk this week has had to defend his role as an unelected official who has been granted unprecedented authority, opens new tab by the Republican president to dismantle parts of the US government.
Since Trump took office on January 20, Musk has dispatched members of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to scrutinize sensitive personnel and payment information in government computer systems. Musk has led a successful drive to dismantle two agencies, one that provides a lifeline to the world’s needy, USAID, and another that protects Americans from unscrupulous lenders, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has disparaged civil servants as bureaucrats who are not elected and not held accountable to American taxpayers.
“We really have here rule of the bureaucracy, as opposed to rule of the people democracy. We want to restore rule of the people and so what that means is reducing the size of the federal government, basically reducing regulation,” Musk told the Dubai audience.
Trump has said Musk, the CEO of Spacex and Tesla who also owns X social media platform, will excuse himself from any conflicts of interest between his various business interests and his efforts to cut costs for the federal government
Earlier, President Donald Trump ordered US agencies on Tuesday to work closely with top adviser Elon Musk’s effort to shrink the federal workforce by identifying government employees who can be laid off and functions that can be eliminated entirely.
With his 4-year-old son by his side or on his shoulders, billionaire Musk stood next to Trump in the Oval Office at the White House before the order was signed, taking questions from reporters and making it clear that he was leading efforts to cut what he saw as government waste at Trump’s behest.
Wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, the world’s richest man defended his role as an unelected official who has been granted unprecedented authority by the president to dismantle parts of the US government.
“You can’t have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that’s responsive to the people,” Musk said. He called the bureaucracy an “unconstitutional” fourth branch of government that in a lot of ways had “more power than any elected representative.”
Musk, the Tesla, opens new tab CEO and owner of X, pushed back at criticism that he and his Department of Government Efficiency team have operated largely in secrecy.
DOGE has provided no information on whom it employs, where it is operating or what actions it is taking inside government agencies. It posts few actual results from its work, providing only dollar figures for purported cuts in specific agencies and little specific detail. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
