Meet the Press NOW — February 11

Welcome to Meet the Press Now. I'm Garrett Hicken, Washington, where we begin with Breaking News. Right now Elon Musk is in the Oval Office of President Trump signs an executive order relating to Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Jeff Mason, who covers the White House for Reuters, tweeted this photo of Musk along with his young son with the president just moments ago.

According to the reporters in the room, Musk is speaking about adding what he calls common sense control to government. We are expecting video from this signing to play out later in the hour. We will of course bring it to you when it happens. Again, according to the reporters in the room, President Trump said he may have to look at judges who are blocking his effort to make cuts inside the federal government.

That comes as the Trump administration is escalating its fight and threats of defiance against the federal courts as rulings challenging the legality of the president's agenda are starting to pile up today. The White House put out a statement saying quote, these unlawful injunctions are continuing continuation of the weaponization of justice against President Trump. The White House will continue to fight these battles in court and we expect to be vindicated. The president has every right to exercise his executive authority on behalf of the American people who gave him an historic mandate to govern on November 5th.

This comes as NBC News learned today that senior officialite FEMA instructed staff to ignore a federal judge's ruling that halted the administration's freezes on grant funding. Even after that, Judge Warren, for a second time that the administration was not complying with his order. We've got a lot to talk about. So let's get right to it.

Let's get right to it. We've got White House correspondent Aaron Gilcrest. We've got Bon Hilliard on Capitol Hill. Also, it means NBC News Justice and Intelligence correspondent Ken Delaney and along with NPR technology correspondent Bobby Allen.

Thank you all for being with us. And Aaron, I'll start with you. Walk us through what we know about what's happening in the Oval Office right now. So, Garrett, you were talking about some of the pool notes that we've been getting and to sort of pull the curtain back for your viewers.

These are those group reporters as we showed a photo who've gone into the Oval Office where the president, as you said, has been seated at his desk along with Elon Musk standing next to him. And they've been talking and answering some questions. And we've been getting sort of bits of notes from reporters who are in the room as they've been able to type out things quickly. We know the president asked Elon Musk to explain what Doge is and what it's doing.

And Musk said, at a high level, what's the goal of Doge? And he said that the goal was to restore democracy. He said there was a feedback loop problem with the government and with the government bureaucracy and that that feedback loop needs to be fixed. He says, it's not optional to reduce federal expenses.

It's essential. That's the quote from Musk there as he talked about what he's been finding. President Trump asked him to talk about what he's been finding, his team at Doge has been been finding as they've been going through different systems and different departments. And he talked about finding things where he said that they were exploring federal employees who had high net worth despite their low pay and that they were putting in place common sense controls that it was not radical, that they want to right-size the federal bureaucracy.

So Gary, just a few things have been coming out from the pool that's gathered in the room there. As you noted, we expect to get video, a play out of what's happening there in a few minutes once this is all over. We don't yet know the exact details of the executive order that the president is signing. We do know, as you noted, that it is related to the work that Elon Musk and his team have been doing.

Well, and we should just pause to say, I mean, Elon Musk has been the center of every controversy basically here at official Washington for the last two weeks or so, the center of so much attention on this. So it is somewhat extraordinary to get to hear from him on these issues for the first time in the Trump presidency. But this is not the only story we're covering today, because we also have these court battles with the White House saying it will continue to fight in court, they say, until the president is vindicated. Aaron, does the administration have a plan in place for if that vindication doesn't come?

Is it continued defiance of these orders like we saw at FEMA? Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're seeing here. Obviously, we've seen more than two dozen challenges in court over the last couple of weeks as it relates to these executive orders and actions that President Trump has taken. And in some of these cases, you've had judges put administrative holds, pauses, stays, whatever you want to call it on some of these executive orders.

And yet we still see the administration moving ahead, at least in terms of broadening its investigations of different departments. And as soon as you see one hold put in place, one pause put in place, suddenly there's a new department where there are those members showing up and there are executive orders related to some of the work that those wants to do in those different departments. And so it seems as though the administration wants to continue moving ahead with its effort, as the president has said, to find ways to find fraud and to try to shrink the size of the federal government, both the workforce and the money that the government is spending here. All right, Aaron, stick around because you've got your eyes on what's going on inside the Oval Office.

I want to turn to Vaughn. Now, Vaughn, the speaker defended Vice President Vance's tweet earlier about judges and executive power, this idea that basically the president is going to call the shots over these judges. On Capitol Hill right now, are Republicans generally speaking, feeling the same way? Right.

I asked Speaker Johnson explicitly whether he had any concerns about the executive power from this Trump administration. And he said, no, that they are fighting on behalf of the American people. Now, let's be clear here, Garrett, it's your question. Talking to numerous Republican senators specifically, they have by and large cautioned against the idea of defying the courts and understanding that there is a separation and that the decision whichever federal court it may come from, even if it's against the point of the Supreme Court, that those decisions should be respected.

That included the like of Senator John Boone, the new majority leader. This is a moment here in which the Trump administration, more than seven different federal judges in just the last three days, have effectively put pauses on different elements of the executive orders, where efforts from the Trump administration to impact federal agencies and the federal workforce. And that is where this is coming to a head. And Congress is largely up to this point been silent in pushing back against the efforts of the Trump administration.

But when it came to Vice President Vance's suggestion that the courts could potentially be defied there, mostly stopping short of suggesting that he's in the right on that front. Well, do you get the sense that we've seen this so many times before that the Republicans were talking to you on the record saying, I don't think the President will do that. Are talking to you or hoping that their comments are getting to him on television when it comes to sort of the inception quality of that they really don't want to see him go down this road. Right.

I think it's, Garrett, I think we should be clear here over the last three weeks of this administration. Republicans upon Capitol Hill have largely stood behind the President in each of his executive orders in actions. Many of them controversial in some, including, for example, the effect of crippling and downing of the USAID, which a great many Republican senators have long championed in bid forceful voices behind the idea of the soft power that foreign aid provides internationally on behalf of the United States. And yet what we are seeing here on this front is the head nod that there is a reckoning that the President has, right?

He's talked about taking over Gaza. There is an authoritarian type of tendencies that he has demonstrated and an eagerness to effectuate a more powerful executive branch. Sometimes the cut-stop appropriations from budgets already approved by the previous Congress. And so I think that what you are hearing from some of these lawmakers is the recognition of the potential that the Trump administration will try to push back against some of these courts' rulings, especially over the last 24 hours, over at the Oval Office, and which President Trump has openly suggested that some of these judges should be looked at.

And with a reminder to our viewers that we can get reports via text and email, but not video in real time, I want to swing things back over to Aaron Gilchrist outside the White House with a little bit of an update on what's been going on inside the Oval Office, Aaron? Yeah. Again, we've been getting bits and pieces from what the President is saying in the Oval Office there by way of sort of bullet points. And it seems as though the President has been talking about the buyout program that was announced a couple of weeks ago, this deferred resignation program, and the President said that government workers who take the buyouts will get their money.

There have been some questions, there have been questions raised by several people about whether, how valid these offers might be legally and whether people would ultimately see the money if Congress had not appropriated the money to be spent in this way. The President also said that he hopes the court system is going to allow him to do what he was elected to do. He said that he always abides by the courts, but would appeal a ruling against him. Gary, as we talked about, there have been these cases where judges have put pauses on some of the efforts that the President has been making, and ultimately there will be court decisions, and then there could be appeals after that, on up to the Supreme Court, potentially, and so the President is suggesting that he wants to follow the court decisions, but you should expect appeals.

All right, Aaron, thank you for that. I want to bring in Bobby Allen, who's covered Elon Musk more than anybody, to talk about what we're seeing in the Oval Office, what we hope to see in a few minutes where this tape is turned around. What do you make of what we think we have heard from Elon Musk so far today? How unusual is it for him to talk to mainstream reporters like those who cover the White House in this kind of format, as we're seeing today?

Yeah, Elon Musk has made a war on legacy media, one of his priorities, and it's one of the reasons why he bought X, right? He wanted a way to communicate directly to his supporters in a way to attack the credibility of the media. I mean, I've had many interactions with Elon Musk over the years, and he really relishes, not just saying a report is false, but attacking a reporter personally by sharing memes that are trying to poke fun at them, to sometimes even doxing reporters. He, like, no one else I can think of in Silicon Valley, gleefully comes after the mainstream media, and does so as a way to boost his own message, his own view of the world, and sometimes to boost his own company.

So what we're seeing here, you know, Musk having to engage with the mainstream media, and something that is representing a press conference, this is the first time we've seen it since Doge has really taken over. They've operated largely in this opaque way. He doesn't hold press conferences. He doesn't really talk the public what he's up to.

He's not telling Congress what Doge is up to, what we know about Doge's activities has come largely through leaks. This has been the way it's operated. Doge has operated largely in secret. We're about to see the tape of this Oval Office executive order signing in the comments from both Musk and President Trump.

So with apologies, Bobby, if I cut you off, you mentioned sort of who he reports to. Do we know if Elon Musk reports to Susie Wiles, the chief of staff in this White House? Is there anyone with sort of oversight or control over his activities up to it, including the chief of staff of the president? That's a really great question.

When it comes to the Department of Government Efficiency, one thing is clear, and it's that we don't have much clarity. I mean, I hate to kind of dodge the question, but so many reporters like myself are trying to understand kind of the hierarchy here. Obviously Trump is Elon's boss, right? We know that, but who are his deputies?

We know there's about 40 people. Some of them very young software engineers, one as young as 19 years old, who have come from his former companies or others in the sort of Musk orbit. We have loyalists who are part of this doge team. But in terms of who is leading each and every one of these agency ransacking, we just don't know.

By last health, there's something like 11 agencies that the doge team has infiltrated and has access in some capacity to the computers. You know, they're trying to really trim stuff. Sometimes just, you know, like with USAID, you know, running an agency down to the studs completely. I mean, his goal comes to some of these agencies is to completely dismantle them.

And who are the people overseeing this besides Musk? That's a huge question mark right now. Now, we know from Elon Musk's history that some of these tactics are pretty similar to things he's done in other places. He surges into these companies when he takes them over.

He brings a lot of loyal staff with him. Those are sort of pages from his playbook based on that history. What sense do we have of what happens next? Yeah.

So when it comes to how Elon Musk operates, he is using his Twitter playbook, the fork in the road email that we saw said to some of the government employees was very similar to the one he sent to employees of Twitter. And I remember from covering Elon's hostile Twitter takeover, just how stressed it is to be in the midst of one of his off endings. You don't know what's going to happen. You might find out that your job is eliminated at two in the morning.

You might be pulled into a conference room with a bunch of people who won't identify themselves. Forgive my manners. I'm going to cut you off. Let's go to the president in the Oval Office.

Actually, okay. This is this is X. And he's a great guy. Hi IQ.

He's a high IQ individual. So thank you very much. We had a busy day today. The king just left and we we've had a great discussion terrific discussion concerning Gaza and everything else.

We had discussions also about Saturday at 12 o'clock. It's going to be a big moment. We'll see what happens. I don't expect much happening with these people, but we'll see what happens.

And we're going to be signing a very important deal today. It's a doge. And I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it. And some of the things that we found, which are shocking, billions and billions of dollars in waste fraud and abuse.

And I think it's very important. And that's one of the reasons I got elected. I say we're going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick and that corrupt.

And it seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars worth much more than that in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, we don't want you to do that. So maybe we have to look at the judges because it's a very serious, I think it's a very serious violation.

I'll ask Elon Musk to say a few words and we'll take some questions. Elon, go ahead. Sure. So the, at a high level, you say, what is the goal of Doge or, and I think significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy.

That's my saying, seem like we'll all be in a democracy. Well, if you don't have a feedback, we'd have to, if you, if you, sorry, tell you grub to us can be difficult sometimes. So if there's not a good feedback group from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge and what meaning does democracy actually have, if the people cannot vote and have they will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.

So it's incredibly important that we close that feedback, we fix that feedback group, and at the public, the public's elected representatives, the president and the Senate, decide what happens as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, but you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people. That's the whole point of democracy.

And so, and if you looked at this, if you asked to look at this today and said, what do you think of the way things have turned out? Well, we have this unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has in a lot of ways currently more power than any elected representative. And this is, there's not something that people want, and it's not, it does not match the will of people. So, it's just something we've got to fix.

And they're also going to address the deficit. So, we've got a two trillion dollar deficit. And if this, if we don't do something about this deficit, country's going bankrupt. I mean, it's really astounding that the interest payments alone on national debt exceed the defense department budget, which is shocking because we spent a lot of money on defense.

But, and if that just keeps going, we're essentially going to bankrupt the country. So, what I would say is like, it's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country.

And it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt. And also, could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about 30 million, etc. Right. Well, we, we, we do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in, in the bureaucracy who have a sense of salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is, you know, what, what happened to USAID?

We're just curious as to where it came from. I think they're very good at investing, in which case we should take their investment advice perhaps. But just, this seems to be mysteriously, they get wealthy. We don't, why?

Where does it come from? And I think the reality is that they're getting wealthy to tax our expense. That's, that's the honest truth of it. So, you know, we're looking at, say, well, we'll, we'll, we'll just, if you look at it, say treasure, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the do not pay list, that you don't actually pay it.

None of those things are true currently. So the reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just a massive number of blank checks just line up living. So you can't reconcile blank checks.

You've got comment fields that are also blank, so don't know why the payment was made. And then we've got this, a truly absurd, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year before an organization to get on a do not pay list. And then we're talking about terrorist organizations we're talking about, known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional preparation. It can take up to a year to get on the list, and even what's on the list, the list is not used.

It's mind blowing. So we're talking here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven't been present. So they say, well, how could such a thing arise? That seems crazy.

When you understand that really everything is geared towards complaint minimization. So then you understand the motivations. So if people receive money, they don't complain, obviously. But if people don't receive money, they do complain.

And the fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest. So then when you understand that, then it makes sense. Oh, that's why everything just, they prove all the payments are treasury, because if you approve all the payments, you don't get complaints. But now we're saying, no, actually we are going to complain.

If money is spent badly, if you're actually out of dollars, I'm not spent in a sensible and provable manner, then that's not okay. Your tax dwellers need to be spent wisely. Things that matter to the people. I mean, these things, it's just common sense.

It's not draconian or radical, I think. It's really just saying, let's look at each of these expenditures and say, is this actually the best interest to the people? And if it is, it's proved, if it's not, we should think about it. So, you know, there's crazy things like just grocery examination of social security.

We've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone on 150? I don't know. Okay.

There should be other historical world records. They're missing out. So, you know, that's the case. We're like, I think they're probably dead.

It's my guess. Or they should be very famous. One of the two. And then there's a whole bunch of social security payments where there's no identifying information.

Why is there not identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive social security do receive it. And they receive it quickly and accurately. Also, another crazy thing.

So, you know, one of the things is like, we're trying to sort of right-size the federal bureaucracy to make sure that obviously needs to be a lot of people working with federal government, as many as currently. So, we're saying, well, okay, well, if people can retire, you know, with the benefits, that would be good. They can retire, get the retirement payments, everything. And then we're told, this is actually a great anecdote.

Because we're told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We're like, well, why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated.

The written down piece of paper. Then it goes down to mine. I'm like, what do you mean to mine? Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine.

We store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture of this mine. We'll put some pictures afterwards. And this mine looks like something out of the 50s, because it was started in 1955.

So it looks like it's like a time warp. And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine, the chef, elevator, can move to determine how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down, and then sometimes, and then you can't, nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy?

There's like a thousand people that work on this. So I think if we could take those people and say, you know what, instead of working in a mine shaft and carrying vanilla envelopes to, you know, boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else. And you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way. So, anyway, so I think, you know, that's an example, like at a high level, if you say like, how do we increase prosperity?

Is we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles? And so increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there's a higher standard of living available for everyone. That's that's the actual goal. It's very quiet, but it's quite quiet.

Your detractors, Mr. Moss, including a lot of Democrats. I have detractors. I believe it.

Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way. What's your response to that criticism? Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted, we could have a majority of the public voting for President Trump, one the House, one the Senate.

The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally.

The people voted for major government reform. And that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times that, you know, people don't get what they voted for.

But in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about. Mr. Busk, the White House says that you identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have.

Does that mean that you are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions repost, our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website.

So all our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't know the case where our organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And so, you know, the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very simple and basic. They're not, you know, what I mentioned, for example, about treasury, just making sure that payments that go out, tax pay money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained, that organizations that do not pay list, which are, takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid.

These are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that tax pay money is spent well. So it's got, like to say, a contract with some company of mine at all. But if there's a conflict of interest when it comes to you yourself, for instance, you've received billions of dollars in federal contracts, when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, what's the president I know has directed you to look into?

Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any sort of accountability check in balance in place that would provide any transparency for the American people? Well, over actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, like, wait a second.

Hey, that doesn't, that seems like maybe that's, you know, that there's a conflict there. It's not like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately, you know, but transparency is what we'll trust. Not simply somebody asserting trust.

So it's not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency. So you can see everything that's going on. And you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It's totally obvious.

And we thought that we would not let him do that segment or look in that area. If we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest, and we watched that also. There's a big business man. He's a successful guy.

That's why we want him doing this. We don't want a an unsuccessful guy doing this. Now, one thing also that Elon hasn't really mentioned are the groups of people that are getting some of these payments. They're ridiculous.

And we're talking about billions of dollars that we've already found. We found fraud and abuse. I would say those two words are supposed to the third word that I usually is, but in this case, fraud and abuse. It's abusive because most of these things are virtually made up or certainly money shouldn't be said to.

And you know what I'm talking about? It's crazy. So, but we're talking about tens of billions of dollars that we've already found. And now a judge is an activist judge wants to try and stop us from doing this.

Why? And why would they want to do that? I campaigned on this. I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt.

And it is very corrupt. It's very, it's also foolish as an example of man as a contract for three months. And the contract ends, but they keep paying him for the next 20 years, you know, because nobody ends the contract. You get a lot of that you have a contract that's a three a three month contract.

Now, normally if you're in a small business, and don't fairness, it's the size of this thing is so big. But if you have a contract and you're in a regular business, you end the contract in three months, you know, it's a consultant. Here's a contract for three months, but it goes on for 20 years. And the guy doesn't say that he got money for 20 years.

You know, they don't say it. They just keep getting checks month after month and you have various things like that and even much worse than that actually much worse. And I guess you call that incompetence, maybe it could be corruption. It could be a deal is made on both sides, you know, where I get some money, he kicked, I think he has a lot of kickback here.

I see a lot of kickback here, tremendous kickback because nobody could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts. So he has to get a kickback. So that's what I got elected for that in borders and military, a lot of things, but this is a big part of it. And I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do.

We got elected to among other things for all of this fraud, abuse, all of this, this horrible stuff going on. And we've already found billions of dollars, not like a little bit billions, many billions of dollars. And when you get down to it, it's going to be probably close to a trillion dollars. It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're going to find that will have quite an impact on the budget.

And you'll go to a judge with a hand picker judge and he has certain leanings. I'm not knocking anybody for that, but he has certain leanings. And he wants us to stop looking. How do you stop looking?

I mean, we've already found it. We have a case in New York where $8 million paid, $59 million, $59 million because it's housing migrants, illegal migrants, all illegal, I believe. And we paid twice the normal room rate out of our occupancy. Unbelievable.

Well, if I may sort of just go in for President's comments. At a high level, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half or two trillion to one trillion? And it's really two things, competence and caring. And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half.

And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proteology exam, basically. I sort of just camp out there. So it's not like I think I can get away with something. I'll be scrutinized, not stop.

But with support of the president, we can cut the budget deficit in half from two trillion to one. And then with deregulation, because there's a lot of sort of regulations that don't ultimately serve the public good. We need to free the boldness of America to build. And if we do that, I think you get the economic growth to be maybe three, four percent, and that means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation.

There's no inflation at 26. And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone's at the mortgage, the car payment, their credit card bills, anything, they're student debt, the multi-payments brought. That's a fantastic scenario for the average American.

Imagine they're going down the grocery aisle, and the prices from one to the next are the same, and the mortgage, all the debt payments dropped. How great is that for the average American? We had no idea we were going to find this much, and it's open. It's not like complicated.

It's simple. It's like, we can't believe it. A lot of work, a lot of smart people involved, very, very smart people. But it's, you're talking about, anyway, maybe 500 billion.

It's crazy the kind of numbers you're talking about. You know, normally when you're looking at something, you'll find you're looking for one out of 100. Here, you're almost reversing it. You look for one that's good, and you can look at the title, and you say, why are we doing this?

Why are we doing that? And the public gets it. You know, the public gets it. You've seen the polls.

The public is saying, why are we paying all this money? This is for years. This has gone on. Senator Rand Paul today said that Doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress.

Do you agree with that? Is that the way? I know this. We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse.

If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it's fine with me. I think we'll get the vote, although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote. And how could a judge want to hold this back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence? Why would that happen?

Why would even Congress want to do that now, Congress? If we do need a vote, I think we get a very easy vote, because we have a crack record now. We've already found billions of dollars of abuse in competence and corruption. A lot of corruption.

If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that? Will you abide by the courts? And then I'll have to appeal it. But then what he's done is he slowed down the momentum and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.

You know, if a person's crooked and they get caught, other people see that and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. So yeah, the answer is, I always abide by the courts, always abide by them. And will appeal. But appeals take a long time.

And I would hope that a judge, if you go into a judge and you show them here's a corrupt situation, we have a check to be sent. But we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer? I would hope a judge would say, don't send it, give it back to the taxpayer.

Yeah, if I can add to that, but we're finding exactly a bunch of the frauders aren't even going to Americans. So I think we can all agree that it was going to be fraud. It should at least go to Americans. But a bunch of the fraud rings that they're operating in the United States, and taking advantage of federal government, especially in the entitlements programs, are actually foreign fraud rings.

They're operating in other countries, and actually exporting money to other countries. We should stop that. And this is big numbers. So we've got $100 to $200 billion a year.

Serious. But Mr. Musk, you said that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms were sent to Gaza. But after fact check this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV.

So can you correct the statements? It wasn't sent to Hamas actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct, so we can't trust what you're saying.

Well first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to have a thousand. We will make mistakes, but we'll quickly correct any mistakes. So if the, I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million with condoms anywhere, frankly, I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.

And that's really an enormous number of condoms we think about it. But if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, okay, that's not as bad, but still, you know, why are we doing that? Can you talk about how closely you're working with agency heads as you're directing these caps? Do they have the, how much input do agency heads have when you're making these decisions?

Yeah, we work closely with agency heads. And yeah, so there's a, there are sort of checks in place. So it's not just going in and doing things. Well, I know it's in partnership with agency heads and I check with the president's picture that this is what the president wants to happen.

So we talk almost every day and I, you know, I double check things to make sure is this something Mr. President, do you want us to do this? We'll, we'll then we'll do it. USAID has been one of your main targets.

Are you concerned at all that some of the cuts or that shutting that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to the United States? Yeah, so that's an interesting example. So that's something where we work closely with the State Parliament and Secretary Rubio. And we have, for example, turned on funding for Ebola prevention and for HIV prevention.

Yes, correct. And, and we are moving fast. So we will make mistakes, we will also fix the mistakes very quickly. So I think that there are some worthy things, but, but overall, if you say, what was the bank of the bank, I would say it was not pretty good.

And there was a bunch of what USAID was doing was influencing, influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand a lighter day. I do have a follow up to the, the Pentagon contracts. If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and the president's directing you to look into the Department of Defense. Yes, we definitely need to do it at the president's request.

Does that present all the adventures for you? No, because you have to look at the individual contract and say, first of all, I'm not the one, you know, finally in the contract. This is people at SpaceX or some of which people will be playing for the contract. And I'd like to say if you see any contract where the, where it was awarded to SpaceX, and it wasn't by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know, because every one of them wants.

The president said the other day that you might look at treasuries. Could you explain that a little bit? What kind of fraud, or, and that question goes to both of you, what kind of fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in US treasuries? I think you mean the Treasury Department, as most treasuries will sort of.

You also referenced treasuries on your force in the United States. Well, the, as I mentioned earlier, really the, the first sort of business is to make sure we're actually collecting, sorry if this, otherwise I might enjoy this, but it's, you're sticking his fingers and my ears and stuff. This has been hard to hear sometimes, hey, stop it. So, the stuff we're doing with the Treasury Department is so basic that you can't believe it doesn't exist already.

So, so, so for example, like I mentioned, just making sure that when a payment goes out, it has to have a payment categorization code. It's like, what type of payment is this? You can't just leave the field blank. Currently, many kinds of fields like blank.

And you have to describe what's the payment for, some basic rationalization. That also is left blank. So, this is why, you know, the Pentagon, when it's on the Pentagon, pass an order, I mean, back anywhere, maybe, not at all, whatever, really. And we want to, just in order to actually pass orders, you have to have the national information that allows you to trace the payments.

So, you know, and once in a while, the Treasury has to test to pause payments if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. Like, if a company or organization is on a do not pay list, we should not pay it. I'm sure we would agree. Like, if it's quite hard to yield on that payment, the do not pay list, it means that this is someone that is like dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that kind of thing, we should not get it.

But currently we do, which is crazy. We should stop that. And by the way, hundreds, thousands of transactions like that, you know, we have a big team. And for the sake of the country, I hope that the person that's in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge are allowed to do the right thing, namely make sure everything's honest, legitimate, and competent.

But we're looking at just when you look at USAID, that was that's one, we're going to look at the military, we're going to look at education, then much bigger areas. But the USAID has really corrupt, it's corrupt, it's incompetent, and it's really corrupt. And I can't imagine a judge saying, well, it may be corrupt, but you don't have the right, you got elected to look over the country and to, as we say, make America great again, but you're not the right to go and look and see whether or not things are right that they're paying, or that things are honest that they're paying. And nobody can even believe there's other people law professors and they've been saying, can't how can you take that person's right away?

It's supposed to be running the country, but we're not allowed to look at who they're paying it to and what they're paying. We have massive amounts of fraud that we call it. I think we probably go way over a lot of billions of dollars already in what do weeks? And it's going to go to numbers that you're not going to believe.

And much, as I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. And the only way to catch it is to look for it. And if a judge is going to say you're not allowed to look for it, that's pretty safe for our country.

I don't understand how it could even work. I'm sorry. Can you personally guarantee that the BIAL program, the operative federal workers, can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid for some money? But they're getting a good deal.

They're getting a big buyout. And what we're trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people. We have office space.

It's occupied by 4%. Nobody's showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave him a five-year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them gave him a five-year pass that for five years, you don't have to show up to work. And let me tell you, this is largely, and much of this stuff is because of Biden.

It's his fault. He allowed this country, what he did on our border. What he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with all of these contracts that have come out. It's a very sad day when we look at it.

I can't even believe it. But many contracts just extend, and they just keep extending, and there was nobody there to correct it. And that cannot be, I can't imagine that could be held up by the court. Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, whatever, doesn't have the right to go over their books and make sure everything's honest.

I mean, how can you have a country? You can't have anything that way. You can't have a business that way. You can't have a country that way.

Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. We'll be at the White House tonight at about 10 o'clock. If you want to come over, you can say hello.

Not much. No, they were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually. I hope that's the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war, and millions of people can stop being killed.

They've lost millions of people. They've lost, in terms of soldiers, probably 1.5 million soldiers in a short period of time. We've got to stop that war. And I'm interested primarily from the standpoint of death, we're losing all those soldiers.

And they're not American soldiers. They're Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. But you're probably talking about a million and a half. I think we've got to bring that one to an end.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We've been watching an extraordinary look behind the curtain at the White House inside the Oval Office with the two most powerful people in the country right now, President Trump and Elon Musk answering reporter questions and defending what has been an aggressive effort at times checked by the courts at times not to overhaul the federal government.

I think some of the key takeaways include the fact that we are essentially counting on Elon Musk to be telling us the truth about the work they're doing. He spoke at length about transparency, saying that the work that his committee, the Doge, does is posted on their X account and on their website. But so many of his statements are uncheckable, comments about billions of dollars in waste and fraud, questions about the net worth of people who work for USAID. Examples put forward in a manner that for those of us who do this for a living, it is almost impossible to check.

So as we take this all in, as we take this all with the grain of salt, let's bring back in our reporters, including NBC White House correspondents Aaron Gilchrist and NPR technology correspondent Bobby Allen. Aaron, I'll go to you first here. The president says he will abide by these court rulings here. But in terms of Elon Musk, it sounds like there were essentially almost no controls except his own goodwill for how he wants to continue to work that this Department of Government efficiency is doing.

I think you're right. And he suggested that he was operating with maximal transparency. That was the term that he used in talking about responding to a question about how people were going to be able to understand whether there were checks and balances on the work that he and his team have been doing. I agree with you.

This was an extraordinary moment to see. This is the first time we've really seen Elon Musk try to explain to any degree what he's been doing in a public setting like this. The first time the reporters have been able to ask him questions about the work that he's been doing. And as you know, there's still some verification that needs to be done, but he seems to suggest that in the course of the last couple of weeks, he and his team have been able to go through these agencies and uncover President Trump said billions and billions of dollars of government waste fraud and abuse.

He talked about the Treasury Department having systems in place that didn't really pass muster in a business sort of mindset in terms of computer systems that would account for where the money was going. He talked about a do not pay list that would include terrorists and fraudsters and that list not being adhered to in some instances in terms of payout that was coming from the government. So I think, Garrett, at the very least, we got some answers about what Elon Musk has been doing. The question, of course, now becomes, you know, let us see the receipts on those answers so that we know that this is actually what's going on there and that you're actually saving some taxpayer dollars somehow.

Transparency builds trust was a quote that I highlighted. Bobby, I want to bring in you here because I've heard something in this that I don't often hear from, press conferences with Donald Trump, an admission in this case from Elon Musk where he said, some things I say will be mistakes and should be corrected. He says, we're moving fast, we're going to make mistakes, we're going to try to fix them quickly. What did you make of that admission from Elon Musk as the things they are moving fast through?

Are federal government apparatus here in Washington? Yeah. I mean, it is something that you often hear from President Trump and honestly, you rarely hear it from Elon Musk when he has been fact-checked by independent fact-checkers, he will attack the fact-checkers when it's pointed out on ex-step statements he is making are exaggerated or he's spreading a mistroof or he's amplifying something that is just a lie. He typically doubles down.

He's not one to admit that he is wrong. So that was a pretty extraordinary admission. But I agree that a really big takeaway here is he is claiming that Doge is operating in a transparent way. He said, go over to Doge's ex-account and we have a full accounting of what is happening.

Well, I just did that. And you can see there are some contracts that are being canceled in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the human element is completely missing. The thousands and thousands of career civil servants whose lives are completely up in the air right now, do they have a job? Will they have a job tomorrow?

What's going to happen to their agency? There's no details about that. So this was a really remarkable moment to have reporters directly asking Elon Musk, hey, there are some pretty egregious conflicts of interest. How will you respond to this?

And he didn't really respond. I mean, look, at the SpaceX example, President Trump wants Elon Musk to go in and reduce the right ways to the Department of Defense. SpaceX, one of his companies, has multi-billion dollar contracts. So how do you explain that potential conflict of interest?

And Elon said, well, you know, if you look at the other bidders, our bid was the most superior. We have the best bid. Well, that may be true, but that doesn't address the question. How do you resolve this conflict of interest?

All right, Bobby Allen and Aaron Gilchrist, thank you for staying with us for the hour to talk through all of this news today. I'm joined on set now by Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks, he's a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Congressman, you were able to sit through this and listen to it with us. Elon Musk says he is showing his work, and we should trust him.

Do you? No. Look, there's a way to trust. Bring it down to the Capitol.

Let's have hearings on it. Show us we have oversight, responsibility. That's the job of Congress, this separate branches of government. That's what the market is about, not just the executive, the executive, the legislation legislative and the judiciary.

Bring it that I have requested of the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Bring individuals down from the government. Bring Elon Musk or anybody from Doge there. Let's see and let's talk about what's taking place.

Let's have them answer questions and present facts or evidence and show us. I think that's the way to do this. When Biden was the president, then Chair McCall, he constantly subpoenaed the State Department, the USAID and people came down and they testified before us and all of the members of the Congress were able to utilize and do their oversight responsibilities. What is happening now, it's like you have a king and you have his person and they're telling the people, this is what the deal is.

Their argument, Congressman, is that this is what the American people voted for, that Elon Musk, I mean, he was a key circuit for Donald Trump. They were out on the campaign trail saying, we want to move fast and break things, basically. We want to come in and fundamentally change how government works. Why shouldn't they be doing that?

Well, look, what they should be doing, if you're talking about what he campaigned for, was that food prices would go down, that gas prices would go down, that the inflation rate would go down. You don't buy that argument that by getting the deficit down, you can get the inflation down. No, because look, what they're doing also, at the same time, he's talking about taking over Gaza, taking over Greenland, taking over Panama. All that has to be paid for.

There's been no mention with the formal payments that he wanted given to visit, where that money's going to come from. And the proof of the fact of the matter is, under the first Trump administration, when you look at the deficit, it grew greater than any other president ever. So there's no track record by this president, when he was the former president, that he knows anything about deficit reduction. In fact, what the evidence, if you want to see what that really shows is, everything that he's talked about benefits, those top oligogs that were at the inauguration, they, in these tax cuts that he wants to create, not to bring down the deficit, but to make sure that the oligogs, like Elon Musk, makes more money.

The average African American, they get nothing out of this deal. When you hear Elon Musk say, we're going to make mistakes, we want to be called out on it, we want to try to fix it. Does that give you any optimism for things like so many of these programs that USAID have run that have been canceled, might be able to be restored, that some of the damage that has been done over the last two weeks could be reversed? We have food imports right now, wasting.

That should be giving to folks millions of dollars lost. I get emails on a regular basis, one just yesterday, he's stuck in Lebanon, told that he can't do nothing. All the work has shut down. His kids and families in Kenya, because he's at a sold spot, nothing is happening there.

93 missions have been shut down around the world. 93, nothing is there, no one is there. So individuals who are Americans and who have worked for us are at bay, they don't know what's happening. You know what it does?

It hurts our national security. China and Russia are chopping out the bit. They're waiting to get in there where we leave out because these individuals now will have nowhere to go. So if you're going to investigate this, you don't shut down 93 missions.

You don't forget about national security, which is at stake here, when we abandon these missions. You talked about Russia. I want to make sure we have time to get this in. Mark Fogel had been held in Russia for, I think, three years now on a plane back to the United States tonight.

You heard the president ask about this at the very end of that saying that basically not much was given to Russia to get him back into the country. Do you believe that? Do the Russians ever give anything for free? I've never seen that other than.

I think what Vladimir Putin likes is he sees someone that's similar to himself and will want to run a government as he runs the government in Russia. I don't think the people of the United States wants that. He wants the United States Congress to be like the the doomer and the government in Russia where they have no real say. They suppose we have jurisdiction over the budget.

They have nothing in Russia. It's just what Vladimir Putin says. And if you don't agree with Vladimir Putin, what does he do? He puts you in jail or he does something to you?

That's exactly what Donald Trump wants to do. He wants to be Vladimir Putin. Congressman, we can go another hour, but we're out of time. Thank you so much for coming in for your patience as we all witnessed this historic news conference as it was together.

Gregory Meeks from New York. Thank you. We're back tomorrow with more Meet the Press Now. But the news continues with Hallie Jackson right now.

I'm Craig Malef. Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half-hole kind of guy.

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