Elon Musk says DOGE tries to be 'careful' with cuts on Fox News 'rehab tour'

Carson Swick, Baltimore Sun on Mar 29, 2025

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

As the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency have drawn widespread backlash, Elon Musk says his team is working to be more “careful” in pursuit of their goal to cut $1 trillion in federal spending.

“I feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services. It’s about making it better,” Musk said Thursday during an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier.

Musk and six other members of the DOGE team, which includes scientists, business executives and software engineers, sat down with Baier to make their case for cutting total annual federal expenditures from roughly $7 trillion to $6 trillion. When Baier brought up attacks on DOGE from Democratic lawmakers, Musk responded that his department measures “twice, if not thrice” before making cuts while acknowledging that mistakes are possible.

“They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that, which is not to say that we don’t make mistakes,” Musk said. “If we were to approach this from the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball’s got to bat a thousand. That’s impossible.”

DOGE’s recent high-profile “mistakes” have included: firing and then scrambling to rehire Energy Department employees working with America’s nuclear stockpile, firing and rehiring Agriculture Department employees involved with the government’s bird flu response and misrepresenting the amount of money saved from cutting government contracts. DOGE listed an $8 million contract as being worth $8 billion and counted a single $655 million contract at the U.S. Agency for International Development three times.

Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican, described Musk’s Fox interview as a “rehab tour” while noting the Trump White House and his House GOP colleagues have complained about negative media coverage of DOGE.

“Musk is on a rehab tour, which makes sense because what he’s trying to do is conceptually popular,” Curbelo told The Hill. “The execution is where he’s lost a lot of the public.”

An NBC News poll earlier this month found that 46% of those surveyed liked the idea of DOGE while just 40% did not, but 41% approved of DOGE’s results while 47% disapproved. Musk himself was also unpopular, with a majority of those surveyed (51%) viewing the world’s richest man unfavorably, according to the poll.