US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk gave their first joint interview to Fox News, with the co-chair of the department of government efficiency (DOGE) saying that he is there to provide the Republican leader with “technical support”.
Musk told the media outlet that one of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is to ensure that the presidential executive orders are properly carried out.
With “tech support” printed on his T-shirt, the Tesla CEO said that he was present there to “provide the president with technology support”.
Since the president is the elected representative of the people, his works are representing the “will of the people”, Musk said. He further added that “if the bureaucracy is fighting the one of the people, and preventing the president from implementing what the people want. Then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
The billionaire’s remarks gain significance in the backdrop of the White House clarifying his role in the Trump administration. An official filing noted that Musk is by no means a formal employee of the DOGE and does not hold “formal authority to make government decisions”.
Musk, who has been a close ally of President Trump, has been tasked with co-chairing the efficiency department with an aim of drastically cut down federal budget, including mass layoffs.
Further, while speaking to Fox News, Musk also sent out a message to “those worried about his power as an unelected advisor to the president”, saying that they should rather be more concerned about the sea of unelected federal employees in the US government’s “civilian workforce”.
‘Recuse myself from political decision’
The DOGE co-chair said that him and his team is “trying to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit”. This, in fact, was also backed by Trump who said he thinks that Musk “is going to find a trillion dollars”, adding that he believed it would be only a small shortage of the waste and abuse really in government spending.
In view of the repeated concerns raised over his role in the Trump administration and the political circuit thereafter, Musk clarified to the media outlet that he has not asked President Trump for anything ever and reaffirmed that he would remove himself from any political decision that involved his own companies, which had anything to do with government contracts.
The White House, in a filing by Director of the Office of Administration Joshua Fisher, said that the Musk is an employee of the White House, “a non-career Special Government Employee” with a title of the “Senior Advisor to the President”.
The filing was made as part of a case that was brought against Elon Musk by 14 states, including New Mexico.
Notably, Musk has been hitting the headlines often in the past few days, with his DOGE team targeting several federal agencies including the USAID and the Social Security Administration.
