Speaker 1: What's going on.
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And again, thank you so much for your support. Again,
I want to just point out the just the vision,
the image of Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the
Oval Office, Trump sitting behind the resolute desk, Elon standing
you know, to Trump's right, but to the left of
the screen because we're looking at them. So Elon's standing
there and he's got his little kid who's like, I
don't know, three years old or something, who's very well behaved.
I mean, yeah, I know he kind of you know,
he was acting like a so he's kind of walking
around and then he wants to get held picked up.
Elon puts him on his shoulders, and the kids like,
you know, messing with his dad's hat and his hair
and all this. But by and large a well behaved
kid like I at that age, I probably would have
been just like running around grabbing all of the sharpies
off of Trump's desk or something. And Trump didn't seem
to mind. And they seem to get along. And by
the way, that's the other image that comes across in
this media availability at the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, is
that these two guys do not hate each other. They're
not vying for supremacy, alpha dog status and all of that.
They seem to both understand the mission, right. The mission
is to root out all of this waste and fraud
into abuse and the stories that Musk brought had they
been broken, and you can still, by the way legacy
outlet people, reporters, you can still go and investigate this stuff.
So that's going to be one of the nice benefits
is when the day when the information comes out, when
this data is produced, you're going to be able to
track this stuff too, and you're going to be able
to do this kind of investigative journalism and you're going
to be able then to affect change, which is what
gets you the awards. That's how you win awards. That's
the model. Right, reporter uncovers something they then rush to
the government and they're like, what are you going to
do about it? And some lawmakers like, oh my gosh,
this is terrible. I'm going to do something about it.
And then they file a bill doing something about this thing,
and then it passes, and then the media, you know,
pats itself on the back, and then they submit that
for awards material and then they win awards for it
because they did something that you know, affected change. You
can do this with all of these grants, all of
these programs and stuff. You can go out and find
the corruption and save American taxpayers billions of dollars. You
can help in this fight. You can do it. This
is a good thing to do. This is a necessary
thing to do. So listen to Musk here. He says
that at a high level, and this is another brilliant move. Here,
they're taking back the word democracy because the left has
been using this as sort of a catch all for
everything anti Trump. Right, Trump is a threat to the democracy.
Democracy dies in darkness, like all of this catastrophizing about
the democracy and Trump or sorry. Musk distills this down
and how it relates to the task at hand. The
purpose of their mission is to in fact, restore democracy.
Speaker 3: If there's not a good feedback loop from the people
to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat,
if the bureaucracy is in charge, and then what meaning
does democracy actually have. If the people cannot vote and
have there will be decided by their elected representatives in
the form of the President and the Senate in the House,
then we don't live in a democracy.
Speaker 1: We live in a bureaucracy.
Speaker 3: So it's incredibly important that we close that feedback we
fix that feedback group, and that the public, the public's
elected representatives, the President of the House and the Senate,
decide what happens as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy.
This is not to say that there aren't some good
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 a democracy.
Speaker 2: Yes, precisely, that's the point. If you can't ever change
this Leviathan, then you really don't have a voice in
the governing of your country. And so when somebody runs
on a platform and promises that they are going to
root out the deep state, the bureaucratic managerial class. They
are going to find the waste, fraud, and abuse. They're
going to act as your retribution. They're going to find savings,
so you keep more of your money. That will increase
economic productivity. It will put more or let you keep
more money in your pocket. That generates more economic activity,
and you are more free. We are all more free.
That's what people voted for. And I know the left
doesn't understand this because they think that everybody that voted
for Trump is just a fascist. See, this is the
problem when you think in just this narrow way about
all these other people and why they voted. When you
make these assumptions and then you blind yourself to reality, failure,
right is when reality and your wishes meet. Okay, and
your wishes are not based in reality. Like you may
try to fool the markets for so long, but you
don't fool them forever because the market is us. He says.
We have a fourth branch, an unelected, unconstitutional branch of
government that has more power now than really any elected representative.
And this is not in line with the will of
the people. The other part of it is the truth
the two trillion dollar deficit.
Speaker 3: If we don't do something about this deficit, country's going bankrupt.
I mean, it's it's really astounding that the uh, the
interest payments alone on national debt exceed the defense de
public budget, which is shocking because we've got a lot
of we spend a lot of money on offense. But
and if that just keeps going, we're essentially going to
bankrupt the country. So what earlier to say is like,
it's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses.
Speaker 1: It's essential.
Speaker 3: It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country,
and it's essential for America to have the resources necessarily
to provide things to its citizens and not simply be
servicing vast amounts of debt.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: The problem is that that's what gets you elected. See,
so the people running for office, they make all of
the promises, I'm going to do this, I'm gonna do that,
I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that,
and then people vote so they can get something out
of the treasury. The same sort of stuff happens at
every level of government, all the way down to Hoa's,
and people don't want to pay for the things that
you have to pay for, and they want you know,
I don't want to pay any money. I don't want
to pay assessments, high assessments. And then you don't do
any of the maintenance, and then stuff starts falling down,
and then oh lo and behold, we don't have any
money to fix everything, and now you're bankrupt and your
home values crater. Like this is all predictable. People on
the right have been talking about this looming catastrophe of
the debt for my entire life, longer than my entire life,
aside from the one brief period under Bill Clinton with
a Republican Congress where they balance the budget and I
would submit it wasn't even really balanced because it doesn't
address the unfunded liabilities in the out years of Social
Security and Medicare obligations. But at least it was like
revenue meeting expenses. And now we have borrowed so much money,
as he just said, the interest to service the debt
is more than we spend on the military, which like
eight hundred billion dollars. That is insane. That will bankrupt us.
And you know what happens overnight if we are no
longer the world's reserve currency. Because we're now no longer
a stable currency. Your standard of living will be cut
in half overnight because nobody's going to be using the
dollar for everything. It's not going to be the currency
of the globe. And then you end up with other
countries or maybe the UN trying to do its own currency,
and they will do the exact same thing. They will
inflate it by making promises, printing debt and then running
more and more deficits, and then everything crashes like this
is not fiscally sound. It has to get fixed, And besides,
isn't this the best way to fix it? To root
this stuff out, find the savings, and then you don't
have to worry about Medicaid, Medicare, social security being touched. Right,
all right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
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Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
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create a Video dot com. Elon Musk standing alongside of
Donald Trump in the Oval Office talking about what DOGE
is doing, and Trump said, some of the things that
they have found so far in their investigation has been shocking,
to say the.
Speaker 4: Least 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 said.
Speaker 1: We're going to do that.
Speaker 4: Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that's 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.
Speaker 1: In just a short period of time.
Speaker 4: 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. Well, so maybe we have
to look at the judges because it's very serious. I
think it's a very serious violation.
Speaker 2: And Trump kept coming back to this line of attack.
He kept referencing the court rulings that have been trying
to stop Doge and his administration from doing what I
think it's pretty clear they are empowered to do. He
is the leader of the executive branch, and these courts
seem to be saying, you can't look at this stuff
even though it's inside the executive branch. And if the
chief executive can't do that, then what are you saying
about the power of that bureaucratic branch, this fourth branch
of government, that they're unaccountable, they can do whatever they want.
That's nuts. Musk highlighted then deficiencies, specifically in the Treasury
Department accounting process.
Speaker 3: Basic controls that should be in place that are in
place in any company, such as making sure that any
given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is
a comment field that describes the payment. If a payment
is on the do not pay list, that you don't
actually pay it.
Speaker 1: What None of those things are true currently.
Speaker 3: So the reason that departments can't pass ordits is because
the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just
a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building.
So you can't reconcile blank checks. You've got comment fields
that are also blanks. You don't know why the payment
is made. And then we've got this a trillly episode.
A do not pay list, which can take up to
a year before an organization to get on a do
not pay list, and this we're talking about terrorist organizations.
Speaker 1: We're talking about known.
Speaker 3: Fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not
match any congressional appropriation. Can take up to a year
to get on the list, and even once it's on
the list, the list is not used it's mind blowing.
So what we're talking about here, we're really just talking
about adding common sense controls that should be present.
Speaker 1: That haven't been present.
Speaker 2: It doesn't make any sense unless it's intentional, Right, Like,
how do you not adhere to basic accounting principles? You're
the Treasury Department. You deal with the money. The irs
is under you. Guys, they go after people for not
doing proper accounting. Businesses and individuals face criminal penalties if
they don't do this stuff correctly. And you guys aren't
even coding things so you know how to track spending.
And he says, this is why departments can't pass audits.
They can't even pass an audit. I don't even have
a high opinion of audits. Most audits don't even catch
a lot of fraud. They don't. I mean, when I
was up in Asheville, the Bunkham County government was passing
all of its audits every single year. Meanwhile the county
manager was siphoning off millions of dollars in corruption. So
like that's I don't like, that's a minimum. You can't
even pass an audit, but you don't even do the
data collection and the entry on the front end in
order to attempt to pass an audit. It's craziness, Musk said.
The stuff that they are finding is so basic that
you can't believe it doesn't even exist already. This is
a guy that comes out of the business world and
he looks at this stuff and it's like, what are
you doing? How has this been able to go on
for so long? You cannot audit If you can't trace
the payments, you don't know what you're spending the money on.
So how did it happen? Well, he has an explanation
for that too. All right, if you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
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At the press availability yesterday, Elon Musk talked about the
Treasury Department's failure to do basic accounting mechanisms so they
can follow where the money is going. So basic, he says,
you can't believe that these systems don't already exist, and
then he explains how this happens and why it happens.
Speaker 3: Really, everything is scared towards complaint minimization, so that then
you understand the motivations.
Speaker 1: So if people receive.
Speaker 3: Money, they don't complain, obviously, but if people don't receive money,
they do complain. And the fraust has complained the loudest
and of the fastest, so then when you understand that,
then it makes sense. Oh, that's why everything just they
prove all the payments at Treasury, because if you approve
all the payments, you don't you don't get complaints. But
now we're saying that, no, actually we are going to
complain if money is spent badly, If your taxpayer dollars
are not spent in a sensible approval, then that's not okay.
Speaker 1: Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, he said. This is not draconian, this
is not radical. It's common sense, and it is he
is exactly right, Like, why wouldn't you want to root
out this kind of fraud? Why wouldn't you want to know?
He pointed out that there are also people listed in
the social Security system as being one hundred and fifty
years old, not.
Speaker 3: You know, anyone's one hundred and fifty I don't, Okay,
they should be on the Guinness Booker World records.
Speaker 1: They're messing out, so you know that's the case, where
like I think they're probably dead, that's my guess, or
they should be very famous. One of the two.
Speaker 3: And then that a whole bunch of social ccurity payments
with is no identifying identifying information? Well, why is there
no identifying information? Obviously we want to make we want
to make sure the people who deserve to receive Social
Security do receive it, and that receive it quickly and accurately.
Speaker 2: Social Security payments without any identifying information. I still don't
even understand how that happens. What does that mean? Is
there a name on the check? It's getting mailed to
an address, but there's no record of the person. I like,
I don't even understand that. And then this is I
think the craziest thing. We are storing retirement paperwork for
federal employees in a mine, an actual limestone mine in
a mountain.
Speaker 3: The most number of people that could retire, possibly in
a month, is ten thousand.
Speaker 1: We're like, well why is that? Well, because.
Speaker 3: Time at paperwork is manual on paper, It's manually calculated,
that written down on a piece of paper. Then it
goes down to mine and like, what do you mean
a mine? Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we
store all the retirement paperwork that and you look a
picture of a picture of this mine. We'll post the
pictures afterwards, and this is this mine looks like something
out of the fifties because it was started in nineteen
fifty five, so it looks like.
Speaker 1: It's like a time warp.
Speaker 3: And then the speed, then the limiting factor is the
speed at which the mine, the shaft elevator can move,
determines how many people can retire from the federal from
the federal government, and the elevator breaks down and sometimes
and then you can't nobody can retire.
Speaker 1: It doesn't that sound crazy? Yeah, there's a thousand people
that work on this.
Speaker 2: There are a thousand people. There's a thousand people that
work on just federal employees retiring, and they have to
calculate it all of their retirement benefits by hand. And
I heard this morning from a former federal employee. They
say it takes like four to six months. They calculate
it by hand. And you know that's not going to
go well because eventually nobody's going to be alive that
knows how to do any math anymore, and so like,
I don't even know what we're going to do at
that point. They then put the documents in a Manila
envelope and then they have to transport them down a
mining elevator for storage and they put pictures out. I've
seen the pictures. It's I mean, it's pretty cool. It
looks like a villain's layer from a Bond movie, except
like with paperwork, you just like rows and rows and
racks of boxes filled with all of these envelopes of
all the federal retirees. I don't know if any of
them are one hundred and fifty years old. But the
limiting factor, he says, is the speed of the elevator.
It just takes so long to ride the elevator down
for you to drop off the paperwork in the storage
facility or something. And so that's that's why you can't
have Because they he said, they encountered this problem and
they learned about the mine when they were offering early retirement. Hey,
why don't we just get a whole bunch of people
to early retire and that'll help cut the workforce down.
And they were told, oh, you can't do that because
we're limited to only ten thousand people a month. Because
that's the speed of the elevator. That's what Who designed this?
Why did we build this? I mean, I guess it's
in the mine or it's in a mountain, in a mine. Shift.
So I guess like at the time, it was a
good idea, like this is going to be really secure.
You're gonna have to run down a mine elevator to
get down there. But my gosh, Like, you guys know
there are computers. I know they're fairly recent inventions, but
holy Toledo, how about we use some of these super
smart computers to do this stuff? Right? Like I'm I'm
upset when I can't get a W two send to
my email and I can download it, you know, Like,
and you guys got to wait six months for your
retirement to kick in because it takes an elevator shaft
that long to run. It's just insane. This is insane.
Why are we doing this Because that's the way it's
always been done, he said. Having people do anything else,
like really, like almost literally anything else in the society
rather than running Manila envelopes down a mind shaft would
be more productive and that would add to the prosperity
of the entire country.
Speaker 3: Like at a high level, if you could say, like
how do we increase prosperity is get people to do
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.
Speaker 1: A higher standard of living available for everyone. That's the
actual goal.
Speaker 2: That's the goal. Why are you fighting me on this?
Do you disagree that that is a worthy goal? Well,
let's talk about why you don't want Americans to be
more prosperous, Like why don't we all just start with
something like, hey, guys, how about we make a faster elevator,
Like could we unify around that? Like start small baby
steps here, Democrats, let's have a faster elevator down the
mine shaft for the filing of the retirement documents. H
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and make memories that'll last a lifetime. A couple of
emails here, This is from Philip. It's a peat mail.
Philip writes in and says, my bad in thinking that
the Marxist hatred of lower taxes was just ideology. And manifesto.
Now I see that the Marxists want more money for
themselves and their communist agenda. This explains the ad infinitum
request to raise the debt ceiling and taxes. Similar to
Satan in the movie The Devil's Advocate who plans to
overload the system until it all comes crashing down. Well,
that's Cloward and Piven, pure evil and criminal. Usaid spending
at a time of unprecedented budget deficits is corruption at
the highest levels. John, Yeah, John is not impressed with
the what was there name? Melanie Stansbury a Democrat from
New Mexico, shrill and constantly using the words literally and actually,
couldn't abolished speaker be used. Now she's the ranking member.
She was the best they had to offer, which is
kind of said. Dennis says, it appears that the Democrats,
in their drive through media's code phrase for the week
is constitutional crisis. Indeed, go back and listen to the
podcast of either Monday or Tuesday show. Yes, this is
the narrative they're going with. It's no longer the democracy,
it's constitutional crisis. He says. I would suggest that the
best example to define constitutional crisis is to turn back
the pages of the last four years. John says, let
me do the math here. There's a thousand people working
at the Federal Retirement Center. In that mine, only ten
thousand people can retire per month, and that means each person,
each employee doing the processing, is processing ten retirement packages
per month, which is two point two five packages a
week per person. Well, you know there, they're probably all
working from home, and they're doing it by hand. They're
manually calculating the retirement benefits. So I guess that could
be a two week or a three day process per package.
I mean that's each package then takes you like twenty
hours or eighteen hours, let's say, per week per person.
Are we hiring the best math people for this gig?
I don't know. Or maybe we should hire people with
stronger backs so they can haul more of the envelopes
down the elevator. No, he says, it's the speed of
the elevator. And there was a reporter who asked Musk
whether or not this is a hostile takeover.
Speaker 1: Your detractors, mister Musk, after what including a lot of Democrats,
I have detractors.
Speaker 4: I don't believe it, say that you're orchestrating a hostile
takeover of government and doing it in a non transparent way.
Speaker 1: What's your response to that criticism.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a struggle
mandate from the public.
Speaker 1: The public voted.
Speaker 3: Uh, you know, we do have a majority of the
public vote voting for President Trump.
Speaker 1: We've won the House, who won the Senate.
Speaker 3: The people voted for major govement 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 and a lot of times that you know people
that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency,
they are going to get what they're voted for.
Speaker 1: And that's what democracy is all about.
Speaker 2: Show me what demokrase looks like, right, isn't this what
all of the protesters in the streets have been demanding.
This is actual responsiveness. This is why it's such a
foreign thing to see. We don't understand. We wait, we
voted for you based on these promises. Now you're doing it.
I'm so confused. Email from greg. He says a friend
of mine helped the State of Florida DOT with their
accounts payable. He spent six months creating a system. After testing, training,
and implementing the system, the head of the DOT told him,
we are not going to use the system because it
ties our hands in writing checks. Yeah, that is not
That's not surprising, right. They want a free hand to
do what they want to do, and if that doesn't
align with the priorities of the voters, will pound sand
voters take a hike scram Michael Schellenberger a journalist, independent journalist,
author of the book San Francisco, San Francico. He says
The New York Times says that Elon Musk asserts without
proof that bureaucracy is rife with fraud. Without proof, okay.
Schollenberger points out that the GAO under Joe Biden General
Accounting author or Government Accounting Office under Biden estimated last
year that we are losing somewhere between two hundred and
thirty three billion all the way to five hundred and
twenty one billion every year to fraud, up to half
a trillion dollars in fraud every year. In the GAO report,
under Joe Biden. This is not Elon Musk asserting quote
without proof. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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