During a meeting with former President Donald Trump on Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk proposed creating a “Government Efficiency Commission” to cut government waste and offered to “help” with the effort.
Musk called for the creation of the commission during a two-hour-plus conversation with President Trump on Monday night, who was very open to the idea. The relevant conversation begins around the 1:44:00 mark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
“I think it would be great to have a government efficiency commission that would look at these issues and make sure that taxpayer money, taxpayer hard-earned money, is being spent appropriately,” Musk told Trump. “If that kind of commission were created, I’d be happy to work with them.”
“I would love that. You’re the best cutter,” Trump responded. “I mean, if you look at the way you work, you come in and you just say, ‘Do you want to quit?’ I won’t say the name of the company, but the company goes on strike and you say, ‘All right, you’re all quitting.'”
He added that Musk would be “highly qualified” for such a role and “would be thrilled to take it on.”
Earlier in the debate, Musk stressed that the US needs to cut spending, noting that “inflation comes from government overspending because government checks never bounce.”
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“Right now, I think we’re growing a trillion-dollar deficit roughly every 100 days,” he added, “and the interest payments on the national debt now exceed our defense budget. It’s in the trillion-dollar range and growing.”
President Trump agreed with Musk that government spending must be reined in, before saying shortly afterward that “there’s an incredible amount of waste and no one will negotiate on price.”
Trump cited his successful negotiations with Boeing for more than $1 billion in price cuts on Air Force I and another plane as an example of how he has managed to cut waste during his presidency.
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana, on Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
“But I said I wouldn’t pay 570 yen. [billion]”… I’m not going to do that. I said, ‘Who made the deal?'” Trump said, saying he was informed that former President Barack Obama’s team had made the deal.
“I said, ‘Well, I understand this deal is a no-go. I’m not going to do it.’ And it took about four weeks of me saying, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ and I got $1.6 billion off the price for an identical plane, except with a nice new paint job,” he added.
Trump told Musk to “multiply this example with thousands of other items,” implying similar measures would be taken more broadly across the federal government.
“Exactly. Multiply that by billions,” Musk said.
