WASHINGTON — The Department of Government Efficiency now has about 100 staffers hunting for federal spending cuts, President Trump said Wednesday, as its leader Elon Musk plans to slash $1 trillion in expenditures.
“I want to commend Elon … They started off with 12. I call them 12 geniuses. They started off with 12, and they went to 20 and 25 and now they’re up to almost 100 people joining to help them,” Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office.
“Tomorrow, I’m having a news conference. I’m going to read to you some of the names that hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars have been given to — and if you tell me that we should be giving money to those things, those entities, I think you probably have to leave as a reporter because you’re not very talented.”
The DOGE initiative’s internal functions have been shrouded in mystery and the Musk-led team’s size was not widely known even within the executive branch before Trump’s remarks.
It’s unclear how many of the 100 helpers are, like Musk, unpaid special government employees. Some of the initial hires were reported to be in their early 20s or late teens and many are associated with Musk’s businesses.
Musk, 53, took questions from journalists Tuesday alongside Trump in the Oval Office and said that he hopes to halve the roughly $2 trillion federal deficit.
“With the support of the president, we can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to one,” the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla said.
“If you can cut the budget deficit by a trillion between now and next year, there is no inflation,” Musk said.
“And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone’s mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, any — their student debt, their monthly payments drop. That’s a fantastic scenario for the average American.”
Trump on Wednesday praised DOGE’s decision to revoke $80 million in FEMA funds to house migrants that had been in New York City’s bank accounts saying that hotels were “making a fortune” putting up recent arrivals, many of whom illegally crossed the southern border under former President Joe Biden.
Local officials protested had been appropriated by Congress for that purpose — and said they were weighing legal options.
Musk’s initiative effectively shuttered USAID last week and began the process of firing most of the $50 billion-a-year foreign aid agency’s 10,000 employees and scrapping most of its grants to outside organizations.
DOGE, in cooperation with the White House Office of Management and Budget, this week closed the office of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and began the process of dismantling the 1,700-person agency.
CFPB operations are unusually funded by the Federal Reserve and DOGE is looking at possibly turning over about $712 million in bureau funds to the Treasury.
The cost-cutting initiative on Monday canceled the Education Department’s nearly $900 million in contracts for the Institute of Education Sciences, which tracks academic performance, as DOGE leans into deep cuts at that department.
The Education Department, which Trump has announced plans to abolish, has an annual budget of about $268 billion.
Other early targets have included tens of millions of dollars in news outlet subscriptions, including $8 million for Politico, whose industry and policy newsletters were widely used by federal agencies.
DOGE has axed 62 contracts worth $182 million at the Department of Health and Human Services — including a $168,000 contract for an exhibit extolling Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health Museum, the initiative said on X, which Musk owns.
Trump said Wednesday that many more cuts will be made by Musk, who has said he intends to lead the fiscal crusade for about four months — as Democrats and array of opponents file lawsuits seeking to reverse his actions.
“There’s so many transactions, thousands and thousands of transactions, and if you don’t have people that care, you’re going to lose control,” Trump said.
“And that’s what’s happened, and we’ve caught it now. What we thought is billions and billions of dollars, but it’s a tiny fraction of the real number, because you can never catch the real number, because people have gotten away with tremendous amounts of money.”
