What Elon’s DOGE cuts are really about

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Hi there, it's PK from the new podcast, Politics Now.

Matt Bevan will be along in a second for If You're Listening, but I just want to tell you about our new politics podcast, Politics Now.

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug, and Yora people.

When Elon Musk and his government efficiency crack squad got to digging into the U.S.

federal budget, the White House started making all sorts of claims about the stuff they'd found.

And one of the first major scandals?

Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.

That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.

Preposterous.

50 million.

And do you know what's happened to them?

They've used them as a method of making bombs.

How about that?

Yeah, how about that?

Now, it may or may not surprise you to hear that this story is not true.

I mean, to start with, condoms are designed to contain explosions, not cause them.

While the US has sent aid money to the International Medical Corps in the Gaza Strip, none of that money was spent on contraceptives.

But here's a fun fact.

There are a lot of places around the world called Gaza.

There are towns called Gaza in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Lebanon.

There's also a Gaza province in southern Mozambique, in the middle of the world's biggest HIV hotspot.

I wonder if that's where the condoms were headed.

I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.

I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.

And that is really an enormous number of condoms if you think about it.

It wasn't $50 million in condoms, by the way.

U.S.

foreign aid programs spend about $50 million on contraceptives in Africa each year, $7 million of which is on condoms.

Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.

Okay, maybe check if things are correct before saying them.

It works for me.

But Elon Musk is saying a lot more things than me.

He has has been posting an average of 150 times a day on his website X.

If he's sleeping six hours a night, as he says he does, that means he's posting on X once every seven minutes.

Most of these posts are about scandalous government spending that he and his team from the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge

have found as they kick open the doors of government offices and rummage through their files.

A $17 million program providing tax policy advice to the nation of Liberia.

A $178,000 news subscription from the Veterans Affairs Administration.

A $58 million program to house undocumented migrants in New York hotels.

You know, I'm doing this because I think it's it's it's critical to the future of the country.

Musk plans to cut $2 trillion out of the US budget by the 4th of July 2026 and then ride off into the sunset.

After that, I hope I can not be in politics.

That would be my hope.

The thing is, everyone agrees that the US government is a mess, and everyone agrees that it's spending like 40% more than it earns.

And everyone agrees that something should be done.

And yet, there are mass protests across America against what Musk is doing.

Stop the coup!

Stop the grift!

Stop Elon Musk!

Take our country back!

So, how did it get this way?

If there is all this waste, why has nobody cut it already?

And if Elon Musk is doing this the wrong way, what's the right way to do it?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Back to that press conference with Elon Musk and President Trump in the Oval Office.

Oh, and X, Musk's four-year-old son.

He was there too.

X, are you okay?

This is X,

and he's a great guy.

High IQ.

One of the things Musk talked about during this appearance with Trump was a limestone mine.

They're like, what do you mean a mine?

Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.

As an Overcastrian, when someone mentions a mine, my ears prick up.

We love a mine here.

See, a key part of Elon Musk's budget cutting plan is to reduce the size of the federal workforce by inviting people to retire.

We were told, no, the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.

We were like, well,

why is that?

I'm intrigued.

Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper.

It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper.

Then it goes down a mine.

Now, as we've established, Elon Musk says a lot of things, and some of the things he says are incorrect.

And should be corrected.

This isn't one of them, though.

This isn't a Gaza condom situation.

American retirement paperwork really is stored in a limestone line.

This is actually, I think, a great anecdote.

I looked into it, and he's right.

It is a great anecdote.

And it actually helps you understand what Doge

is trying to do.

But Elon tells it wrong, so I'm going to take over from here.

If you want to make a difference and you're looking for a door to opportunity,

Career America, the U.S.

government, is the right choice for you.

One of the reasons working for the US government is the right choice for many people is because the retirement benefits plan is, as far as American retirement plans go, pretty good.

But the process is really complicated.

When you retire, you fill in a long and very old timey form.

It asks many specific questions about your life and everything you ever did for the federal government or military, because depending on your answers, your benefits could go up or down.

You attach many documents to back up your answers and you send it to the government.

A team of people then check it all to make sure that you aren't lying.

And when I say check it, I don't mean they just read the forms.

They call every bit of the government you've ever worked in and get them to send more documents to them that they can check for themselves.

All of this generates a lot of paperwork, which needs to be kept secure and safe from fires and disasters.

This is how it's always been done.

And by the 1950s, there were just too many files to manage in some office building in Washington.

The government decided to shift them to a secure location in western Pennsylvania, provided by a company called Iron Mountain Atomic Storage.

Iron Mountain is one of the most protected places on earth.

The company bought up abandoned limestone mines around America and converted them into enormous secure storage facilities that that could survive nuclear attacks.

This is where the government keeps patents of countless inventions.

The Social Security Administration is here.

By the end of the 70s, the government had moved all the staff maintaining the system to the mine too.

If you're a retired federal employee, your file is down here too.

Now, you're probably picturing a coal mine.

Snow White and the seven bureaucratic dwarves shoveling government paperwork into a dusty hole.

But limestone mines aren't like that at all.

The site consists of dozens of enormous caverns with thousands of people looking after business archives, the original prints of most Hollywood movies, negatives of historic photos, master copies of most hit songs from the last century, and the federal employee retirement system.

And here's the thing.

The system basically hasn't changed in decades.

It's all still done on paper.

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.

Now, Musk says that the reason that only 10,000 people can retire every month is because of an elevator.

And the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the

federal government.

And the elevator breaks down

sometimes and then nobody can retire.

Doesn't that sound crazy?

It does sound crazy.

And that's because it's nonsense.

For one thing, I've watched a lot of footage of the mine and they don't seem to get around in elevators.

They're driving stuff around in cars and trucks.

They're not basing decisions on elevator capacity.

The problem actually isn't in the mine.

It's the fact that it takes months of phone calls to double check the details on every retirement form, gathering together documents sent from all over the country.

They can only process 10,000 people a month because that's how long the process takes.

Since 1980, more than $100 million has been spent trying to figure out how to digitise the system, but every attempt has failed.

It's not just a matter of digitising the records in the retirement office.

It's a matter of digitising the documented history of everyone who has worked for the federal government in the last half century.

You could do this, but it would require a lot of government spending in the short term, which would lead to massive savings in the long term.

In fact, these energy energy drink chugging weekend working technology literate Doge boys are maybe exactly the people that you want solving the problem.

But that's not what Elon Musk is suggesting though.

And that's not what Doge is all about.

He wants to sack everyone in the mine.

So I think if we can take those people and say like, you know what, instead of working in a mine shaft and

carrying manila 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.

But then who's going to process all of the retirement forms?

Or are they all just going to pile up at the entrance to the paperwork mine?

And setting that aside, let's say that Musk eliminated the mine tomorrow.

Let's say he eliminated the entire Office of Personnel Management, the retirement office belongs to.

Somehow got ChatGPT or Grok or whatever AI system to do all the work instead.

How much would that actually help with his mission?

How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion

Harris Biden budget?

Well, I think we could do at least $2 trillion.

Here's the thing.

It would barely make a debt.

I'm not just MAGA.

I'm Doc Goslick MAGA.

The US federal budget is huge.

When you're talking in billions and trillions of dollars, it's hard to get a sense of scale.

So I'm going to talk about the budget like it's a big jar of water.

The budget is $6.7 trillion.

So I filled it up with 6.7 litres of water.

Elon Musk wants to cut the US federal budget by $2 trillion.

So I've got a second jar that holds 2 litres of water.

So to reach this goal, we've got to fill this jar right up.

And for this to work, we're going to have to live in a parallel reality where none of this is getting challenged in the courts or stopped by Congress.

Musk and Trump are carrying on as though those pesky democratic processes won't stop them.

And so for the next few minutes, we will do that too.

Okay, to start, let's scoop out the Office of Management and Budget.

So empty the mine and the government's entire HR department with it.

Well, that's almost half a billion dollars.

I'm going to need an eyedropper for this.

There we go.

Half a billion.

So I'm 0.02% of the way there.

So let's cut the entire U.S.

foreign aid budget to $0.

Cut aid to Ukraine, disaster zones, the condom budget down to zero.

That's a shot glass out of the jar.

That's okay.

Still plenty of things that can go.

The other day, Trump was asked about the Department of Education.

Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately.

Look, the Department of Education is a big conjug.

That's half a cup.

Still a lot of water in the jar.

Let's go full Doge and really swing the axe.

Let's eliminate NASA, the Department of Commerce, the CIA, the EPA, the arts budget, the National Archives, the Smithsonian.

Let's privatize air traffic control and shut down the FAA.

Actually, why don't we shut down the entire Department of Transportation and the Department of Labor as well.

Doge has been poking around there too.

Cut them all.

Well, we've managed to find another whole cup of water to take out.

Not a cup each, mind you.

All together, one cup.

We're still not even a quarter of the way there.

This is not going to work.

So let's start again.

I'll pour all of Elon's savings back into the budget.

And now, let's shut down the entire US government, except for healthcare, social security, and defense.

That's 785 billion dollars, still not even halfway there.

So let's shut down the US military.

That's $850 billion

and we're still $365 billion short of Musk's goal.

That's because the vast majority of the U.S.

federal budget is Social Security and healthcare payments, which they say will not be affected.

Yeah, Social Security will not be touched.

It'll only be strengthened.

We want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it.

Trump says they will make savings there by finding people who are receiving payments fraudulently.

Some government estimates indicate that fraud may cost more than $500 billion annually.

That, combined with the total shutdown of the U.S.

government and military, would get us past Elon Musk's target.

target.

But a significant proportion of the people we have just sacked are there specifically to prevent fraud like this.

Shuffling papers and making calls in limestone mines.

If you want to cut down on fraud, you probably need more of these people, not less.

And if you want to cut down on fraud and cut the size of the government workforce without entirely breaking the whole thing, it has been done before.

There are ways to do it.

But Musk and Trump won't like them.

They're not very dark gothic MAGA.

In September 1994, US Vice President Al Gore stood in front of the White House and presented his plan to cut government spending.

It came in book and CD-ROM form.

And he told the press how he came up with the plan.

Most of these ideas in here are ones that federal employees at the grassroots level, where the rubber meets the road have for years been saying, why don't they do this?

He actually talked to the people who work in the government and worked with them to find efficiencies.

At the same time, President Bill Clinton raised taxes.

Over the course of five years, Clinton, with Gore, reduced the deficit from $290 billion

to a surplus.

which he planned to use to shore up the budget for the future.

We can do so by dedicating the lion's share of the surplus to saving Social Security and Medicare and paying down the national debt.

It was quite an achievement, difficult, unpopular at times, and complicated.

It is projected to be only the first of many.

As I said in the State of the Union, America is on course for surpluses over the next quarter century.

I mean,

not quite.

They got four years of surplus budgets and a quarter century on.

Well, you remember the giant jar.

But if you want to bring down government debt, that's how you do it.

The thing is, Doge isn't really about reducing government debt.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump think that the US government is staffed by corrupt, idiotic, wasteful, woke bureaucrats who love nothing more than getting in the way of their Make America Great Again mission.

They want to destroy the US government bureaucracy, not save it.

And a lot of their cuts are are about bringing the business of government in line with this ideology.

Cutting off spending on things like climate change, foreign aid, diversity, equality and inclusion.

Government subscriptions to the failing New York Times.

America's budget deficit isn't because of fat cat woke bureaucrats.

It's not because of condoms in Africa or mine shaft elevators.

It's because healthcare and social security is way more expensive than ever before.

If you wanted to fix it, you could make careful reductions and raise taxes.

But I don't think either Trump or Musk are interested in that.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan.

Audio production this week is by Adair Shepard.

Tickets to our live show in Adelaide on the 1st of March are sold out.

Thank you to everyone who is coming along.

I'm really looking forward to seeing you there.

Lots of ABC podcasts will be at the festival including our friends from Not Stupid, Julia Baird and Jeremy Fernandez.

Jeremy's apparently saving an incredible story for the event about the time he accidentally shut down a whole ABC studio and broke Radio National.

I don't know the rest of that story, but I'm promised that it's in the live show.

By the way, I have also accidentally broken a studio and taken a national program off air, but I managed to avoid blame, so I'm taking that one to the grave.

It's all part of Podfest at Adelaide Writers Week.

We'll link to the program in the show notes.

If you missed out on tickets to our Adelaide show, you'll just have to come to me.

I'm doing it live up the road from my house on Sunday, the 6th of April at the Newcastle Writers Festival.

No tickets, just show up.

First come, first serve.

What could possibly go wrong?

Next week, looking at what the Trump administration is doing to the U.S.

justice system.

It is quite a story.

I'll see you then.